One HDD failure causes ANOTHER HDD failure....panic!
Here's a desperate cry for help.
-My father has an iBook G4 800, 640 ram, 60gig hdd. He takes a lot of pictures, and has a huge iPhoto library. He told me that his computer has been behaving really slow, and that when he deletes a photo from iPhoto, a white blank icon with a question mark shows up.
Really weird, so I decide to back up his iPhoto library on my external just in case his hdd will crap out.
-I drag the iPhoto lib onto my external. I leave, come back in a few hours and it looks like it's done. Except I open my external to see that NOTHING has been copied.
I repeat the process of copying it
-This time I come back in a bit and it gives me an error and says a certain photo could not be read.
I start to go deeper into the folders of the iPhoto library to copy individual folders one by one, after a few gigs, I hit the cannot be read error.
-I look at the files already copied onto my external. Randomly, one of them disappears. I drag another one in the trash...poof...gone. I did NOT empty trash, yet the file is gone and the trash is empty.
I start to get worried so I plug the external onto my computer and run a disk check using Disk Utility. Major ERRORS...CANNOT be repaired! S.M.A.R.T not supported. -now the external fails to mount!!!
-If I boot my dad's iBook into single user mode and run fsck -yf, it also tells me the drive cannot be repaired.
I'm really worried now. My dad has years of photos: over 19,000 of them. Photos saved: 0
What do I do?!?
My external I just bought not a month ago from Lacie. I'd shudder to think that it's messed up.
Please help!
-My father has an iBook G4 800, 640 ram, 60gig hdd. He takes a lot of pictures, and has a huge iPhoto library. He told me that his computer has been behaving really slow, and that when he deletes a photo from iPhoto, a white blank icon with a question mark shows up.
Really weird, so I decide to back up his iPhoto library on my external just in case his hdd will crap out.
-I drag the iPhoto lib onto my external. I leave, come back in a few hours and it looks like it's done. Except I open my external to see that NOTHING has been copied.
I repeat the process of copying it
-This time I come back in a bit and it gives me an error and says a certain photo could not be read.
I start to go deeper into the folders of the iPhoto library to copy individual folders one by one, after a few gigs, I hit the cannot be read error.
-I look at the files already copied onto my external. Randomly, one of them disappears. I drag another one in the trash...poof...gone. I did NOT empty trash, yet the file is gone and the trash is empty.
I start to get worried so I plug the external onto my computer and run a disk check using Disk Utility. Major ERRORS...CANNOT be repaired! S.M.A.R.T not supported. -now the external fails to mount!!!
-If I boot my dad's iBook into single user mode and run fsck -yf, it also tells me the drive cannot be repaired.
I'm really worried now. My dad has years of photos: over 19,000 of them. Photos saved: 0
What do I do?!?
My external I just bought not a month ago from Lacie. I'd shudder to think that it's messed up.
Please help!
Comments
Data Rescue II to retrieve "lost" files. (ProSoft Engineering).
I would advise not to use the iBook until you get the DiskWarrior disk.
Originally posted by stevegongrui
Here's a desperate cry for help.
-My father has an iBook G4 800, 640 ram, 60gig hdd. He takes a lot of pictures, and has a huge iPhoto library. He told me that his computer has been behaving really slow, and that when he deletes a photo from iPhoto, a white blank icon with a question mark shows up.
Really weird, so I decide to back up his iPhoto library on my external just in case his hdd will crap out.
-I drag the iPhoto lib onto my external. I leave, come back in a few hours and it looks like it's done. Except I open my external to see that NOTHING has been copied.
I repeat the process of copying it
-This time I come back in a bit and it gives me an error and says a certain photo could not be read.
I start to go deeper into the folders of the iPhoto library to copy individual folders one by one, after a few gigs, I hit the cannot be read error.
-I look at the files already copied onto my external. Randomly, one of them disappears. I drag another one in the trash...poof...gone. I did NOT empty trash, yet the file is gone and the trash is empty.
I start to get worried so I plug the external onto my computer and run a disk check using Disk Utility. Major ERRORS...CANNOT be repaired! S.M.A.R.T not supported. -now the external fails to mount!!!
-If I boot my dad's iBook into single user mode and run fsck -yf, it also tells me the drive cannot be repaired.
I'm really worried now. My dad has years of photos: over 19,000 of them. Photos saved: 0
What do I do?!?
My external I just bought not a month ago from Lacie. I'd shudder to think that it's messed up.
Please help!
Your external will be fine, but will require formatting... Hope you didn't have anything important on it. Recovery tools may help. May not. Macs respond very badly to copying corrupted files... On your bung ibook make sure when you do run a recovery to have another WORKING drive plugged in to recover files to. Terminal may copy off the files easier. It'll give you proper warning messages too.
Try
cp -Rv /Users/username/Pictures /Volumes/sparediskname/foldername
Good luck. Next time back up before everything fails.
-t
Originally posted by stevegongrui
My external I just bought not a month ago from Lacie. I'd shudder to think that it's messed up.
Please help!
I think it will just be a software error so a format should sort it out.
I've had read errors with CDs before and I tried so many things to get the data back. I think the most reliable one was using the command line dd. You can specify options that skip over IO errors.
The command line cp failed at the same point as the Finder for me.
The trouble is that dd is designed for drives or files not folders. So, I wrote a shell script to do it:
http://www.geocities.com/ajr650/recover.sh.zip
If you unzip the file, you will get a file called recover.sh. This is a shell script. You may need to give it execute permissions in which case you would type chmod 755 and drag the recover.sh file into the terminal and hit return.
Now type cd and drag in the directory where recover.sh is located and hit return.
Then type ./recover.sh then drag in the directory you want to recover followed by the directory you want to recover to. Then hit return.
It will then tell you which file is being copied as it goes (even if it fails, you might be able to find a file causing a problem).
I will iterate that your dad should've backed the files up onto DVD regularly. Hard drives are not reliable storage media.
Now we've got 2 copies of the pics.
I lost 20+ GB of photos in a hard drive crash a year ago and I seriously back up now. Scripts, buttons, icons, etc. Somewhere on my computer is a second copy of everything important.
Of course there is a slight catch: I never use iPhoto so this would never have helped. But still...
*Thrusts a finger in air*
Originally posted by stevegongrui
Thanks everyone for the help. I managed to save all the data off the iBook using DiskWarrior. I couldn't believe it, it was like magic.
Heh.
Quote:
Now we've got 2 copies of the pics.
I'd keep one copy in a safe deposit box offsite. 19,000 photos? Actually make that two copies in two different banks. And check the DVD before storing it to make sure the photos are actually on it and that it will mount. Murphy's Law is at its best when dealing with backups.