Failed Hardware:-( at DVinfo.net

Katie Mims · August 12th, 2007, 09:11 PM

Hi Everyone,

I have a 150 GB Maxtor hard drive that I've been working off of for several years now. It houses most of my music and sound effects library, as well as some photography and various FCP files. I had a power outage at my house not too long ago, and ever since then the drive has not been working. It spins and sounds fine, but when I plug it in to my computer it won't mount, and brings up the Disk Utility.

The Disk Utility is able to see it, and when I try to Verify the disk it says that there is an "Invalid B-tree node" and that it needs to be repaired. When I hit repair, it won't complete and gives me a generic error.

Does anyone know anything about repairing this drive? Or possibly rescuing/retrieving the files from it? The FCP files on there are not backed up (unfortunately) and are part of my demo reel update!

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks so much.

Glenn Davidson · August 12th, 2007, 09:15 PM

I had the exact same problem with one of my Glyph drives. Since Glyph has a warranty for such issues, I sent it to them. They were able to recover all the data and fix the problem. They used a program called Disk Warrior. Drive has been fine since. Now I have a uninteruptable power supply.

Edward Carlson · August 13th, 2007, 07:18 AM

I had a similar problem, only on the boot drive! The first thing I did was use the Unix command dd to make an exact copy of the disk, in case the problem was physical and I couldn't access the drive later. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...50302225659382 Then I used Disk Warrior and Drive Genius to recover the files from the disk image. I got a new hard drive and reinstalled the OS. Everything works fine now.

Cole McDonald · August 13th, 2007, 12:21 PM

Continue repairing it. I once had to repair a disk 25 times to get it back to working order. B-Tree problems are problems in the directory of the disk (think of the last time you rearranged the card catalog at the local library). Fixing one problem often uncovers others.

Patience and persistence are the keys. I like to do this from the command line to get better feedback from the repair, if the node identifier changes (two numbers separated by a comma) within 3 attempts, keep trying...the command on the command line is:

diskutil repairVolume '/Volumes/<volume name>'

The single quotes will account for any spaces in the drive name...the double quotes should be omitted.

Steven Davis · August 13th, 2007, 01:02 PM

Well speak of the devil.........

I just had a drive fail, and for the second time in my business I used software from http://www.runtime.org/ and recovered about 465 gig of files. You can download the demo, and bets are that if the software sees your files, you can get them back. The first drive I recovered, about 3 years ago, lost it's volume type, the one I did recently, just failed. So give that software a whirl. Let me know if it works. http://www.runtime.org/ customer service is good too, so you can email them if you have questions.

Cole McDonald · August 13th, 2007, 04:56 PM

No mac software that I could see there.

Katie Mims · August 17th, 2007, 12:26 AM

Thanks for all the info everyone! I tried everything I knew to do. I repeatedly tried to repair it in Disk Utility, and ran Disk Warrior on it multiple times. It always hung up and froze when it began trying to get data to rebuild.

I found out I'm leaving country on Wednesday to work on a documentary, and I caved. I took the drive to a data recovery girl a few friends have used. She's only recovered 1/4 of my data so far; the drive is pretty much toast.

Does anyone have advice on the best drive type to use? I have about 2 terabites worth of data that I need to back up, and I need to replace the drive that failed. The girl working on my drive seems to think Seagate is the best. Maxtor and Lacie the worst, with Maxtor just generally being bad, and Lacie being near impossible to recover data from.

Opinions? Suggestions?

Eric Shepherd · August 17th, 2007, 12:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Katie Mims

Thanks for all the info everyone! I tried everything I knew to do. I repeatedly tried to repair it in Disk Utility, and ran Disk Warrior on it multiple times. It always hung up and froze when it began trying to get data to rebuild.

I found out I'm leaving country on Wednesday to work on a documentary, and I caved. I took the drive to a data recovery girl a few friends have used. She's only recovered 1/4 of my data so far; the drive is pretty much toast.

Does anyone have advice on the best drive type to use? I have about 2 terabites worth of data that I need to back up, and I need to replace the drive that failed. The girl working on my drive seems to think Seagate is the best. Maxtor and Lacie the worst, with Maxtor just generally being bad, and Lacie being near impossible to recover data from.

Opinions? Suggestions?

I've generally had good luck with Seagate drives, and have had Eco Data Recovery recommend them as the easiest to recover and not very many coming in. Western Digital was the worst they said. Seagate has a 5 year warranty now, btw.

The advice everyone has given about trying to fix the drive over and over is the worst advice I've ever heard when it comes to data loss. Continually writing to a damaged/corrupt drive will most likely make the problem worse (which may explain the 1/4 recovery).

The best thing you can do in this situation is install software on another drive, then attempt a recovery to another drive. Never try to fix the problem directly on the bad drive.

I did a recovery for a guy who posted on Craig's List a few days ago. He had a RAID 0 (2 drives, striped) and I was able to recover all 49 gigs he needed from the drives. Trying to fix the drive resulted in further corruption of the filesystem but with the proper software, I was able to recover everything he needed. I burned it to DVD's, reformatted the RAID and reinstalled Windows x64 and it's running just fine again. This problem happened from a power failure while plugged into a surge protector. UPS's are definitely the way to go.

I hope you're able to get back everything you need. :)

Eric

Cole McDonald · August 17th, 2007, 01:07 PM

I've had tons of luck with maxtor and seagate, lots of failed WD drives. I used to admin ~900 servers with 512Gb each...plus about 10 Tb of RAIDs.

Eric Shepherd · August 17th, 2007, 01:10 PM

Yup, same here. I've had drives from every manufacturer crash on me over the years, somehow. But the Seagates have been the most reliable for me. IBM's drives (now built by Hitachi) I'd like to add to the list of drives to avoid. Especially their laptop drives, ugg.. But a quick search for 'hitachi deathstar' will show how many people have been unlucky with them (the real name is Deskstar).

Also, Maxtor is now owned by Seagate, so that should help improve whatever problems there may have been in the past.

August 12th, 2007, 09:11 PM	#1
Katie Mims Regular Crew Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 32	Failed Hardware:-( Hi Everyone, I have a 150 GB Maxtor hard drive that I've been working off of for several years now. It houses most of my music and sound effects library, as well as some photography and various FCP files. I had a power outage at my house not too long ago, and ever since then the drive has not been working. It spins and sounds fine, but when I plug it in to my computer it won't mount, and brings up the Disk Utility. The Disk Utility is able to see it, and when I try to Verify the disk it says that there is an "Invalid B-tree node" and that it needs to be repaired. When I hit repair, it won't complete and gives me a generic error. Does anyone know anything about repairing this drive? Or possibly rescuing/retrieving the files from it? The FCP files on there are not backed up (unfortunately) and are part of my demo reel update! Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks so much.

August 13th, 2007, 12:21 PM	#4
Cole McDonald Trustee Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Sauk Rapids, MN, USA Posts: 1,675	Continue repairing it. I once had to repair a disk 25 times to get it back to working order. B-Tree problems are problems in the directory of the disk (think of the last time you rearranged the card catalog at the local library). Fixing one problem often uncovers others. Patience and persistence are the keys. I like to do this from the command line to get better feedback from the repair, if the node identifier changes (two numbers separated by a comma) within 3 attempts, keep trying...the command on the command line is: diskutil repairVolume '/Volumes/<volume name>' The single quotes will account for any spaces in the drive name...the double quotes should be omitted. __________________ Web Youtube Facebook

August 13th, 2007, 01:02 PM	#5
Steven Davis Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2004 Location: Richmond, VA Posts: 3,065	Well speak of the devil......... I just had a drive fail, and for the second time in my business I used software from http://www.runtime.org/ and recovered about 465 gig of files. You can download the demo, and bets are that if the software sees your files, you can get them back. The first drive I recovered, about 3 years ago, lost it's volume type, the one I did recently, just failed. So give that software a whirl. Let me know if it works. http://www.runtime.org/ customer service is good too, so you can email them if you have questions. __________________ What happens if I push the 'Red' button?

August 13th, 2007, 04:56 PM	#6
Cole McDonald Trustee Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Sauk Rapids, MN, USA Posts: 1,675	No mac software that I could see there. __________________ Web Youtube Facebook

August 17th, 2007, 01:07 PM	#9
Cole McDonald Trustee Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Sauk Rapids, MN, USA Posts: 1,675	I've had tons of luck with maxtor and seagate, lots of failed WD drives. I used to admin ~900 servers with 512Gb each...plus about 10 Tb of RAIDs. __________________ Web Youtube Facebook

August 12th, 2007, 09:15 PM	#2
Glenn Davidson Major Player Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Nevada City, California Posts: 499	I had the exact same problem with one of my Glyph drives. Since Glyph has a warranty for such issues, I sent it to them. They were able to recover all the data and fix the problem. They used a program called Disk Warrior. Drive has been fine since. Now I have a uninteruptable power supply.

August 13th, 2007, 07:18 AM	#3
Edward Carlson Major Player Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: North Hollywood, CA, United States Posts: 807	I had a similar problem, only on the boot drive! The first thing I did was use the Unix command dd to make an exact copy of the disk, in case the problem was physical and I couldn't access the drive later. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...50302225659382 Then I used Disk Warrior and Drive Genius to recover the files from the disk image. I got a new hard drive and reinstalled the OS. Everything works fine now.

August 17th, 2007, 12:26 AM	#7
Katie Mims Regular Crew Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Los Angeles, CA Posts: 32	Thanks for all the info everyone! I tried everything I knew to do. I repeatedly tried to repair it in Disk Utility, and ran Disk Warrior on it multiple times. It always hung up and froze when it began trying to get data to rebuild. I found out I'm leaving country on Wednesday to work on a documentary, and I caved. I took the drive to a data recovery girl a few friends have used. She's only recovered 1/4 of my data so far; the drive is pretty much toast. Does anyone have advice on the best drive type to use? I have about 2 terabites worth of data that I need to back up, and I need to replace the drive that failed. The girl working on my drive seems to think Seagate is the best. Maxtor and Lacie the worst, with Maxtor just generally being bad, and Lacie being near impossible to recover data from. Opinions? Suggestions?

August 17th, 2007, 01:10 PM	#10
Eric Shepherd Major Player Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Orlando, FL Posts: 404	Yup, same here. I've had drives from every manufacturer crash on me over the years, somehow. But the Seagates have been the most reliable for me. IBM's drives (now built by Hitachi) I'd like to add to the list of drives to avoid. Especially their laptop drives, ugg.. But a quick search for 'hitachi deathstar' will show how many people have been unlucky with them (the real name is Deskstar). Also, Maxtor is now owned by Seagate, so that should help improve whatever problems there may have been in the past.