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External hard drive being incredibly finicky(OSX)

yalborapyalborap Registered User regular
edited November 2009 in Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
Okay, so, here's the situation. I have a USB drive hooked up to my Mac. It's a 1 TB drive, partitioned into two separate partitions: A 600GB FAT32 partition, and a 300GB "Mac OSX Extended(Journaled)"(HFS+? I forget) partition.

The thing is...Frustrating. See, for a while it wouldn't mount right unless I opened up Disk Utility, which would see it and all would be well. I could access my data, everything worked, it was just a bit finicky.

Now, lately, that's not working. The 300GB partition seems to be corrupted every time it's unplugged, and I have to run DiskWarrior on it to make it work. After that, all is well, but doing that over and over again cannot be good for the drive.

The 600GB partition seems to be fine, judging from what Disk Utility says when I verify things. But the 300GB partition clearly is not.

And that 600GB partition holds a lot of media. Ripped DVDs, ripped CDs, you get the idea. Stuff that would be a pain in the ass to back up for a full format of the external drive. And I can't ditch the partitioning system, since the 300GB is for my backups.

So, I need a solution to make this thing work. What do you guys think would make it function?

EDIT: Oh, goody. It seems that the power outages I dealt with have corrupted at least the backup partition, since DiskWarrior is now declaring it to be 'slowed due to disk malfunction'.

I am really beginning to hate this goddamned external hard drive.

EDIT2: Aaand I'm just gonna format the damn partition. Apparently this was useless.

yalborap on

Posts

  • RBachRBach Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    How are you ejecting the drive?

    RBach on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • Tanooki MarioTanooki Mario __BANNED USERS regular
    edited November 2009
    Do whatever it is you're going to do, I guess. You posted at 5am EST and decided to dump the whole thing at 7:30am EST. Not much we can do for you.

    Tanooki Mario on
    I'm the artist formerly known as Satan.
  • yalborapyalborap Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    ...Okay, so. My formatting efforts went fine, but now my media partition(the FAT32 600GB one) doesn't want to mount.

    And DiskWarrior doesn't work on FAT32 disks.

    Halp?

    EDIT: And now the whole rig's refusing to be ejected, either.

    ...Quite frankly, I'm ready to throw this thing into a fucking woodchipper and rerip everything I had on the media partition.

    yalborap on
  • yalborapyalborap Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    ...After a reboot, the thing's suddenly working.

    We'll see if it holds up. I'm really hoping the power outage stuff didn't fry the damn computer itself.

    yalborap on
  • ronyaronya Arrrrrf. the ivory tower's basementRegistered User regular
    edited November 2009
    Now would be a good time to make a backup, I wager. And convert the entire drive to FAT if possible.

    ronya on
    aRkpc.gif
  • yalborapyalborap Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    ...Okay, so. I cracked open Linux, deciding to just format this damn thing.

    It...Uh...It froze.

    Goddamned Linux froze.

    Is that a good sign that I need to drop this thing into some form of blessed lake and drive far away?

    yalborap on
  • Tanooki MarioTanooki Mario __BANNED USERS regular
    edited November 2009
    yalborap wrote: »
    ...Okay, so. I cracked open Linux, deciding to just format this damn thing.

    It...Uh...It froze.

    Goddamned Linux froze.

    Is that a good sign that I need to drop this thing into some form of blessed lake and drive far away?

    Have you done anything like a chkdsk yet or any kind of disk inspection tool? Not a recovery tool, but a "is this drive actually fucked" tool. Or is just the act of mounting it toasting whatever OS you have running?

    Tanooki Mario on
    I'm the artist formerly known as Satan.
  • yalborapyalborap Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    Well, it mounted. But the formatting froze it.

    And in retrospect, chkdsk would've made a lot of sense, yes.

    Gonna go hook it back up, we'll see what happens when I run chkdsk.

    yalborap on
  • Tanooki MarioTanooki Mario __BANNED USERS regular
    edited November 2009
    You can do it through the GUI by right clicking on the drive, hit Properties, open Tools tab, hit 'Check Now' under Error-checking and check both boxes. Or you can go to a command line and do
    chkdsk E: /R

    where E is the corresponding drive letter.

    Tanooki Mario on
    I'm the artist formerly known as Satan.
  • yalborapyalborap Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    So.

    It...It refuses to mount, now.

    In Linux AND in Windows. I'm afraid to even hook the damn thing up to my Mac.

    yalborap on
  • Tanooki MarioTanooki Mario __BANNED USERS regular
    edited November 2009
    I'm starting to think we can declare this thing toast. Try to salvage the enclosure, time to buy a new drive.

    Tanooki Mario on
    I'm the artist formerly known as Satan.
  • yalborapyalborap Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    Agreed. Gonna see if I can convince Best Buy to take the thing back, and if not, I'll suck up the cost of a replacement.

    For future reference, was it a stupid idea to have the partitions formatted differently?

    yalborap on
  • RBachRBach Registered User regular
    edited November 2009
    No. You were just unlucky enough to get a bad drive and/or enclosure.

    RBach on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
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