Really Strange External Hard Drive Problem Using USB 2.0
This is my second WD MyBook Essential 500 GB External drive (USB only edition). I returned the exact same model a few days ago because I thought it was defective. Now this new drive is doing the exact same thing that made me take back the first one...
I am using an iMac (Intel CoreDuo @ 2 GHz) running Mac OS X (10.4.10) and have 1.25 GB of RAM. When I purchase the drive, I unboxed it and set it up as follows:
1. Plugged in the USB cord in the back of my iMac (no hub).
2. Powered up the drive (both drives seen after about a minute on the Finder desktop).
3. Open Disk Utility and formatted the drive as HFS+ Journal.
4. After formatting was completed, the drive mounted on the Finder Desktop.
I purchased this product to consolidate two smaller firewire external drives and to unload files from my internal iMac hard drive.
I began to copy files onto the new WD drive (named "Odie"). After about 120 GB of data transfer, I get a Mac OS X error code -36 error (I/O Error - Go here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=9805). After this point, I can't copy anymore files to the drive. It doesn?t matter if it is a 20K Word document or a 15 GB iMovie.
I can successfully duplicate files on the drive to ?take up? more space, but I can?t copy any more files to the drive.
In troubleshooting this issue, I have done the following to try and resolve this issue, but have gotten no where:
1. Verified the disk in Disk Utility which says the drive is fine.
2. Ran the diagnostic tools in Tech Tool Pro, everything says the drive is fine.
3. Tried different USB ports.
4. Reformatted the drive.
I even hook up my MacBook to the drive and was unable to copy files over using it. I am truly baffled by what is going on here? I understand that I may have two bad drives, but two bad drives with the exact same problem?
Did formatting these drives as HFS+ journaled permanently screw them up??
Any help or ideas would be appreciated.
Dave
I am using an iMac (Intel CoreDuo @ 2 GHz) running Mac OS X (10.4.10) and have 1.25 GB of RAM. When I purchase the drive, I unboxed it and set it up as follows:
1. Plugged in the USB cord in the back of my iMac (no hub).
2. Powered up the drive (both drives seen after about a minute on the Finder desktop).
3. Open Disk Utility and formatted the drive as HFS+ Journal.
4. After formatting was completed, the drive mounted on the Finder Desktop.
I purchased this product to consolidate two smaller firewire external drives and to unload files from my internal iMac hard drive.
I began to copy files onto the new WD drive (named "Odie"). After about 120 GB of data transfer, I get a Mac OS X error code -36 error (I/O Error - Go here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=9805). After this point, I can't copy anymore files to the drive. It doesn?t matter if it is a 20K Word document or a 15 GB iMovie.
I can successfully duplicate files on the drive to ?take up? more space, but I can?t copy any more files to the drive.
In troubleshooting this issue, I have done the following to try and resolve this issue, but have gotten no where:
1. Verified the disk in Disk Utility which says the drive is fine.
2. Ran the diagnostic tools in Tech Tool Pro, everything says the drive is fine.
3. Tried different USB ports.
4. Reformatted the drive.
I even hook up my MacBook to the drive and was unable to copy files over using it. I am truly baffled by what is going on here? I understand that I may have two bad drives, but two bad drives with the exact same problem?
Did formatting these drives as HFS+ journaled permanently screw them up??
Any help or ideas would be appreciated.
Dave
Comments
Did formatting these drives as HFS+ journaled permanently screw them up??
Nope, I would suspect the data you are copying. If you have a corrupt file, maybe it's screwing up the filesystem on the drive. Try copying maybe 10 GB at a time and see if it messes up. If it does then you know the problem lies in the 10GB you tried to copy last. Then narrow it down from there.
Maybe run Disk Utility on the drives you are copying from.
Nope, I would suspect the data you are copying. If you have a corrupt file, maybe it's screwing up the filesystem on the drive. Try copying maybe 10 GB at a time and see if it messes up. If it does then you know the problem lies in the 10GB you tried to copy last. Then narrow it down from there.
Maybe run Disk Utility on the drives you are copying from.
If the file system is getting screwed up, wouldn't disk utility at least tell me that there is a problem with the drive?
I will try your suggestions.
Thanks
Dave
If the file system is getting screwed up, wouldn't disk utility at least tell me that there is a problem with the drive?
Yeah it probably should but I've had corrupt directories that Disk Utility didn't detect before - there's only so many checks it can do in a reasonable amount of time I suppose. As soon as I clicked the folder in the Finder, the system froze. If I didn't touch that folder, everything was fine. I eventually just deleted the folder.
The fact that you can duplicate files suggests that there may be nothing wrong with the drive itself so the filesystem might be ok but I'm not sure of what different operations occur copying from another drive vs copying locally.
The behaviour is certainly odd because it lets you duplicate files which suggests the filesystem can be modified without errors yet it won't let you copy externally. This might suggest a problem on the computer being copied from but you tried another computer and it still didn't work so something has to be messed up on the drive itself.
Have you tried to copy via the terminal after this happens? /Applications/Utilities/terminal and type cp then drag a file from your internal drive into the window and then drag in a folder on your external drive and hit return.
There's a command that lets you see what your drive activity is at a given time, I'm not sure if that will report any error. It's called fs_usage and you'd basically do something like:
sudo fs_usage -wf filesys > /test/out.txt
making sure a folder called test exists in the root directory.
Let it run while you try copying and see if it gives you any info. ctrl-c stops the trace.
I had a problem saving to a flash drive a while back. You resolved it for me with this suggestion:
"Try deleting the Finder preferences in /Users/<name>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist. Maybe
check if you have any contextual menu items installed in /Library/Contextual Menu Items."
Not having tech experience, I don't know if this would work on a HDD or not, or even if it could be a similar problem to the one Dave K. has.
I'm just tossing it out for whatever it's worth.
Marvin,
I had a problem saving to a flash drive a while back. You resolved it for me with this suggestion:
"Try deleting the Finder preferences in /Users/<name>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist. Maybe
check if you have any contextual menu items installed in /Library/Contextual Menu Items."
Not having tech experience, I don't know if this would work on a HDD or not, or even if it could be a similar problem to the one Dave K. has.
I'm just tossing it out for whatever it's worth.
That was due to the move to trash contextual menu item not working if I remember right - another menu plugin was making breaking the menu. This could be a Finder issue (though not as probable) and the cp command line test should determine if that's the case.