Okay, before my day goes horribly awry in some new way, I’ll issue a plea for help relative to my external hard drive (a mere eight months old, a 120 gig drive from SmartDisk).
The drive doesn’t show up with Disk Utility or Disk Warrior. It’s getting power and spinning up. My Firewire port on the laptop is working fine (tested it with my iPod and iSight). The cables are good (tested them, too). But no information seems to pass from CPU to drive, or vice versa.
I was running OS X 10.3.3 when this symptom first showed up yesterday morning. I upgraded to 10.3.4 when I noticed this, thinking that the problem might lie in 10.3.3. J P Kang suggested resetting the PMMU; I haven’t tried that yet, but I guess that’s next.
In theory, the drive’s under warranty at SmartDisk, but I’d rather retrieve the data than have them simply send me a new unit (or decide it’s my fault and charge me for repairs). I archived some purchases from the iTunes Music Store on the drive, and I’d be vexed to lose the money I spent on the tunes. . . .
Posted by AKMA at May 28, 2004 07:22 AM | TrackBackThe first thing I would do is try attaching the drive to another computer. If it doesn't work there you can cross the software/computer variable off.
If this is a full-size external drive and not a FireLite you could conceivably open up the enclosure, unplug the hdd and install it into a normal tower. This would allow you to retrieve your data if the problem is the chipset/bridge in the FireWire enclosure. This may very well void your warranty from SmartDisk though.
Posted by: Paul at May 28, 2004 09:42 AMSeconding Paul's recommendation, you might also try booting into OS 9.x and see if it can mount the drive. If it's hardware, it won't make any difference, but if it's something goofy with OS X, it might work.
Posted by: dave rogers at May 28, 2004 09:46 AMThanks for this advice. I tried looking for it from an OS 9 boot — forgot to mention that.
Yeah, opening the case would void the warranty, but I’m not confident that they’ll honor the warranty anyway, when they can always allege any old kind of electrical problem or misuse. Not that I know of either, of course; I’m pretty respectful of my hardware.
Here’s something. I just turned it on, and as it was spinning up I heard a single muted click — the kind of sound I’d expect to hear repeatedly as the drive reads. Just one, and no red light flicker for “responding to computer.”
Posted by: AKMA at May 28, 2004 10:38 AMHmmm hard to troubleshoot remotely. If you are sure it is not on the computer's end then you have a few options. First of all if the drive is broken and on warranty SmartDisk will replace it, most hardware stores are very good with this and I would be surprised if they gave you any hassle. They should pay for your shipping costs too. I would ring them up and ask about the steps for warranty returns.
However, if you need the data recovered don't send it in for an exchange. Like I noted above I would open up the enclosure, pop out the drive and put it into a tower. Chances are the drive may be fine and if not there are several data recovery programs you can try running on it (or try the freezer trick if it's seized). If that's too much hassle, bring it in to a data recovery shop, ask them for something in writing that shows the drive is shot and then take that up with SmartDisk.
Before doing anything with the drive though I would try it on a different computer and then maybe call SmartDisk support (chances are that won't help much). You need to kill off some variables to spot the problem and the computer end of the equation is a big one.
Posted by: Paul at May 28, 2004 11:45 AM