Thread: Hard-Drive Help (NSR)

Ok, tech talk, I know, but this is ski related in a sense that thousands of photos will be lost if I can't find my way out of this dark spot...plus, I'll delete this thread once I get some replies up in it..

I have a 160GB external Seagate USB/IEE1394 (Firewire) hard drive, and I use XP Pro. I took it into Keoki's last night to print some pix, and hooked it into his G4 - worked great, until it got way late and I pulled the plug without dragging the icon to the trash (dismounting). The G4 froze up, then I plugged it back in, then dragged the icon to the trash. Got home, and plugged it back into th epC, and all I get is a box which says "The disk in drive J: is not formatted - would you like to format it now?" I tried CHKDSK, which returns "The file system on Drive J is RAW. RAW File systems are not supported."

So, I thikn I fucked up the master boot record. Upon some late night research, I found that I can pay a SHITTON of $$$ to send the drive out and get it repaired (which may not even work). Or I could try a DIY recvoery program which will re-write the boot record.

1. Is the data still intact?
2. Should I try the DIY software ($40-$149)?
3. Do I need to send it out?
4. Am I totally fucked? Is four years' worth of ski/volcano/travel photography and sweet GIS data gone forever?

Thanks in advance, I know one of you smrt guys/gals has probably dealt with this same issue before...

have you tried banging on it with a hammer?

try plugging it back into a mac. if that works, back-up the data and format the drive when you get home PC style.

Lane - I have a call in with my top IT geek - i'll let u know when I hear something back - That one's a bit outside my realm...

Originally Posted by Evil E

have you tried banging on it with a hammer?

Yeah, I did that for about a half hour, and then poured a beer on it for my homies, but then it just sparked and smelt like burnt dog hair.

FNG - I tried taking it back to the office, it gave me the same error about requiring a format.

EP - thanks man. Whoever helps me out of this is getting a nice print/map of their choice.

Originally Posted by Lane Meyer

Whoever helps me out of this is getting a sweet-ass print.

(In before the edit)

McConkey's ass, I hope.

Midget went through something similar recently. Maybe PM him or search for the thread, I think it was in this forum.

Lane ~ It doesn't sound good.
What I'm being told is this: About the only hope you have of recovering it is to plug it back into the Mac. (Guess FNG wins, huh?)
Don't try to recover it on the PC, it just isn't going to happen.
The Mac apparently has known issues with Firewire device connections & certain chipsets. (McWop might be able to tell you some more about this - one of our resident Mac experts..)

1.Boot the Mac up completely first.
2.Attach the external drive / See if it's recognized by the Mac
3. If it IS - Unmount it correctly (drag icon to trash bin)

At that point, the drive should be fine. Take it home, fire up as usual - and BACK YOUR SHIT UP! IF, on the other hand.......you get a similar message from the Mac? It's likely you scrambled the boot sector of your Seagate & you're completely facked.

The cost of sending it out to have "some" of the data recovered likely would NOT be of interest to you...Grande dinero.

What EPSkis said, however if the boot sector is scrambled not all is lost. Rebuilding a boot sector is not that difficult if you've the right tools. Try hooking it back up to the Mac and unmounting it properly. Don't add or delete any files while it's hooked up to the Mac, and definitely don't format it. Then see if you can read the drive. If not PM me and we can probably figure out a way to get it up at least enough to get your data off it.

If everything above fails, there's this thing called Knoppix Live CD. It's a complete OS on a CD. You can run a fully functional Linux system from it, do filesystem related stuff, etc. It's free, and it lets you fix Windows/Mac related things using linux... I wouldn't recommend using it if you haven't used Linux before, but with a little bit of prior knowledge and some reading you should be able to recover your data. Google Knoppix and there's a ton of stuff out there.

I hope you get your stuff back.

I can't add anything to the discussion about recovering data, but we've found that portable drives have a relatively high failure rate when they're actively being moved from location to location (and computer to computer). We only use them for moving datasets around and not as primary data drives (that's what the raid arrays are for at work).

Keep any data on a portable drive backed up. We've had 3 our of about 20 have problems.

Lane go check out this thread on MacFixit.

http://www.macfixitforums.com/php/sh...5&o=31&fpart=1

Towards the bottom there are some posts that may help. Look at posts by jclark12 and Chocotoff. I'm guessing the Firewire-to-ATA bridge chip in your external drive got fried. Not 100% sure though.

1) Be sure you plug in the external power for the drive when you connect it to the Mac. A recent system update seems to not play nicely with firewire bus powered drives.

2) Restart the Mac with the drive plugged in and powered up.

3) If that doesn't work and it's a combo USB/Firewire drive, hook it up with USB.

4) Finally if that doesn't work, take it out of the Firewire enclosure and mount it inside the Mac or PC (try both if one doesn't work) using ATA.

5) If that doesn't work, pray.

Apple should be taken out and shot for this. They invented Firewire afterall. There's no excuse for these things to be happenning.

Thanks to everyone who tried to help me out with this.

I thought I'd update the situation so that it might serve as a warning to all:

After three weeks of trying to surmount this problem, I finally had to give up and return the drive to Seagate. I tried everythingm re-formatting, re-partitioning, DOS, Linux, called lots of people who are smarter than me - to no avail. The chipset got fried, and all was lost.

So let this serve as a warning to everyone - DO NOT USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES ON BOTH A PC AND A MAC. And if you must, DO NOT EVER FORGET TO DISMOUNT THE DRIVE ON A MAC. A simple half-second mistake cost me three weeks of agony and the loss of thousands of photograhs and maps. Had I $2,900 lying around, I could have gotten the data back, but since I have $0 to spare, I had no choice.

DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE AS ME.

[/rant]

Was the driver formatted FAT or FAT32?

There's no system recovery for those, the sector allocation tables are pretty raw. NTFS is a little more robust.

Originally Posted by Lane Meyer

Thanks to everyone who tried to help me out with this.

I thought I'd update the situation so that it might serve as a warning to all:

After three weeks of trying to surmount this problem, I finally had to give up and return the drive to Seagate. I tried everythingm re-formatting, re-partitioning, DOS, Linux, called lots of people who are smarter than me - to no avail. The chipset got fried, and all was lost.

So let this serve as a warning to everyone - DO NOT USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES ON BOTH A PC AND A MAC. And if you must, DO NOT EVER FORGET TO DISMOUNT THE DRIVE ON A MAC. A simple half-second mistake cost me three weeks of agony and the loss of thousands of photograhs and maps. Had I $2,900 lying around, I could have gotten the data back, but since I have $0 to spare, I had no choice.

DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE AS ME.

[/rant]

Shit mang, wish i would have known. Did you try any recovery software? I've had some sucess in the past with those kinda situations. Also the freezer trick is always worth a whirl.

hmmm... glad i just saw this thread....

a freind of mine just sent me an 80GB firewire harddrive to use for my PC laptop - he said he didn't use it (he's primarily a mac guy) - but he got it secondhand too - so dont' know what happened to it before.

anything I should do/worry about before I plug it in to my laptop?

Originally Posted by skiguide

hmmm... glad i just saw this thread....

a freind of mine just sent me an 80GB firewire harddrive to use for my PC laptop - he said he didn't use it (he's primarily a mac guy) - but he got it secondhand too - so dont' know what happened to it before.

anything I should do/worry about before I plug it in to my laptop?

Just make absolutely sure that when you unplug the drive that the computer and drive are turned off or have been successfully dismounted by the OS.

I use external firewire drives a lot for data storage and movement. They've been relatively trouble free as long as you don't unplug them when they're live. Also remember that when you're moving it around it's more susceptible to bumps and bangs so it should never be your only storage for any particular piece of data if you carry it around much.

Originally Posted by midget

Also the freezer trick is always worth a whirl.

Noooo! Don't do that. Condensation in the drive == bad.

If you have this problem and it's really important you should PM me. My company does some work in hard drive recovery and you can pay in beer.