Drive Going Bad...Kinda Strange Symptoms

[Mayo]

I think that one of my external Western Digital drives is dying... strange noises at startup, only two of four partitions will mount, Disk Utility hangs while trying to access the drive and the Finder hangs, requiring a force-quit.

The involvement of the Finder is a bit perplexing... has anyone else experienced this?

It looks like I'm in the market for one of those Seagate drives...

[Parker]

I love Segate drives!

To recover the data off of the partitions that will not mount, i recommend using Data Rescue II by Prosoft Engineering (http://www.prosofteng.com)
It helped recover data off of my PowerBook drive when it wouldn't mount because it was like corrupt for some reason.
Really a lifesaver program and really worth the money that it costs!

[Jack W]

Hey, Mayo,

If you are in the market for an external Seagate:

Best Buy has the 300GB Seagate Firewire-USB 2.0 on sale this week at $179.99 after $50 instant savings. Methinks maybe they might be coming out with larger externals. ?

The price is excellent. I have one of these drives and really like it.

And I think I saw here that Seagate is now offering  a 5-year warranty on their externals, like their internals??? I can't confirm that, but if they are, then this is not only a good deal, but an excellent one!

- Jack

[kimmer]

Timely thread. Sneakers main drive died yesterday. He'd had "warnings" and because he ignored them, a bunch of our pics are gone.    

Parker, I'll check out prosoft (and why isn't your link clickable?).

Mayo, check OWC for prices. They had some good prices on Seagates.

[Parker]

i probably forgot the slash at end
http://www.prosofteng.com/

idk
i'm using fast reply

[Gregg]

QUOTE(kimmer @ Oct 23 2006, 08:04 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Timely thread. Sneakers main drive died yesterday.

Go for a drive...

Enjoy the scenery!

[Mayo]

A 320GB Seagate drive shipped from OWC yesterday.  Since I already have an enclosure I went for a bare drive selling for $110.

The dead drive is a "back-up" of another external drive, so nothing has been lost. I have learned from the experience of other folks that if a person has a lot of data backed-up on an external drive that there better be a "back-up of the back-up..."

[Mayo]

Wellllll... I didn't do enough trouble-shooting before buying that drive... I installed it this morning and had the same symptoms! I did some tests using my other external drive and I interpreted the results as indicating that the original drive was bad.  I think that the intermittent nature of the problem and the varying symptoms fooled me...

MORE time spent trouble-shooting and it would appear that the Firewire ports are dying, which likely means that a logic board replacement is in order.

 

Thankfully it is still under the 1-year warranty period, but I had to go ahead and purchase AppleCare in order to get telephone assistance from Apple.

I hope that mine (3rd generation) isn't one of those "problem" G5 iMacs that will require multiple logic board replacements.  The fellow in the shop at the local Apple dealer told me that they see "lots" of sick G5 iMacs.

Time to start backing-up everything via USB 2.0...

[Gregg]

Good luck with that, Mayo. It sounds frustrating, but you don't "sound" frustrated. Let us know if Apple found a solution for you...