It all started when I attempted to capture from the HV20 through the MBP to external eSata drive. I got some errors before getting off the ground, so I Repaired Permissions, installed the Easy Setups from Moviola, and got under way.

I was capturing HDV from the HV20 to an external drive via eSata. The capture monitor quickly lagged 30+% behind, and it eventually froze. I pulled up System monitor and saw that only the Main drive was dropping in free space, not the external. First I stopped the camera, then later hit ESC and FCP stopped capturing.

Checking the Capture folder on the Main drive, it was empty, so I looked at the external drive. It showed no contents, zero, all files vanished. A second later the entire computer froze, with the gray overlay about 10% down the screen. No mouse, nothing.

After I turned it back on, I couldn't see either eSata drive.

Moved them to the Mac Pro. Couldn't see them there either. Moved one inside the MacPro. Can't see it there either.

In the PC world I know of some good MBR repair tools that have saved disks.

What is there in the Mac universe to get the job done?

I absolutely don't know if they may help you, but you could try first Disk Utility (part of Mac OS) and next DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior does a good job in recovering disks with broken directories: possibly the disk seems broken but data are still there and only directories are messed up. I used these in the past, and in some cases they recovered my data.
There are others I never tried myself (try Version Tracker for them): after all I believe backing up to a second drive is easier and now also reasonably cheap.

Piero

The disks finally showed up in Disk Utility, but could not be verified. I bought and installed DiskWarrior, which did rebuild the Directories, so I'm back in business.

Scott,

There are a few things you can do to keep your system running smoothly:

- You've already purchased and used DiskWarrior; run it at minimum once a month if not more often depending how busy your edit system gets used.

- Download and run all the routines in Onyx:

Titanium Software (http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/onyx_leopard.html)

Built into that utility is the "Check and Repair Permissions" function which is another must-do maintenance item for the Mac. Although you can do it directly from Disk Utility the other host of routines built into this app are well worth the application usage - and it's free.

The above should be considered mission-critical maintenance items, but if you really want to go the extra mile and maximize both your OS and external HDD's performance purchase iDefrag:

Coriolis Systems :: Products :: iDefrag (http://www.coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag.php)

Do this at least once every 3-6 months, again depending on just how busy your HDD's get used. I've been using the app for almost 3 years now and contrary to common myth, Mac drives do get fragmented and running this app does make a noticeable difference in drives with large amounts of fragmentation - which is clearly visible when iDefrag makes it's analysis.

always run disk warrior FIRST. don't use disk utility because it can make the volume unrepairable.

what you experienced was a kernal panic. it was a low level crash caused most likely by a hardware driver crash, or bad hardware itself. also potentially bad RAM. I'd check connections to the drive and make sure they are good.

FWIW macs actually defrag all files automatically under 20megs. defragging is not a magic cure all, and rarely does anything to fix a real crashing problem. same for fixing permissions. thats such a knee jerk fix without having any understanding of what it does - it sets read / write / execute for various files on the _system_ drive. on non-system files & drives, it does nothing. only on the odd occasion a file you need to write to gets set to read only does this cure anything.