Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with Drive

Hard Drive Purgatory

LongDrive — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:16:01 -0800

The Last-External-Hard-Drive-I-Ever-Buy is stuck between heaven and hell. Can anyone please help me figure out how to rescue it? I have a USB 2.0 WD Mybook 500gb external HD (essential edition) that is causing me a great deal of grief that none of the earlier posts that came up on my search seem to address, both on askme and other support sites, so this is my last resort before emptying my savings on data recovery...

Up until last week, the drive has been connected via a d-link USB port which was externally powered. We had a power failure in my office causing the disk to be 'unproperly' ejected.

Since then, the drive mounts fine as mybook, but as soon as you try to do anything with it, all programs hang until you manually unplug it (and I have it straight into the usb now). And when I say all programs, I mean, Diskwarrior, Techtool, Onyx, Disk Utility, everything. Nothing can touch it.

Even terminal crashes when I try to run a diskutil list, stopping here:

/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_partition_scheme *465.8 Gi disk2

I've tried repairing in terminal which gives me this:

Error encountered attempting to verify/repair disk2: Unrecognized filesystem (-9958)

As well as resetting PRAM, booting off the original CD's and trying things that way. Nothing seems to do the trick. Even Data Rescue II which I ran overnight just froze at the prescan stage the whole time.

All the steps above came out of my initial research, so I still consider myself an advanced novice in these matters, so if anyone in the hive can perhaps suggest some sort of Jedi move I can pull on this, or failing that, a recommendation for Data Recovery in the Melbourne area who can do some sort of evaluation, I would be most grateful.

Thanksyou!

Cloning a laptop hard drive

nomad73 — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:40:39 -0800

Replacing my laptop's hard drive. I think I've almost got it but have some questions about the cloning process. I'm replacing the 60GB EIDE main hard drive (C: drive) of my 4 year old laptop with Win XP Home. I've got a new 160GB EIDE drive, a 2.5" hard drive enclosure, and was planning on using XXCLONE to get the job done. All has gone well so far - I've connected the new drive to the laptop via the USB enclosure, and formatted it. Here are my questions:

1) When I formatted the new drive (using the Windows disk management tool) it asked me to pick a drive letter. I picked a random letter down the alphabet - H: - so as not to get confused with the other two external USB drives I've got running. If the idea is to make a clone of my C: drive and then take it out of my laptop and install my new drive, will the drive letter matter? Will the OS simply see the new drive as the C: drive even though I named it H: when I formatted it? If not, how do I go about naming the new drive C: while I've still got to clone the actual C: drive?

2) XXCLONE has the option, when cloning, to make the new drive bootable - which is what I would like to do, I assume. It copies the master boot record and all that. Does that mean that no matter the drive letter I assign to the new drive, when i pop it into my laptop, it will just boot from the new drive and everything will be fine?

3) Other cloning programs seem to either create a bootable CD that you then run while the C: drive is cloned. XXCLONE does not do this - it operates in XP. Will that present any problems in terms of not copying EVERY exact OS file? I'd rather not spend the $ on Norton Ghost or the full version of Acronis True Image, hence why I'm using XXCLONE - free.

Thank you for any advice you may have. Much appreciated.

Data Recovery for an External Hard Drive Crash

tangyraspberry — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:58:10 -0800

My external hard drive just crashed so can anyone suggest a Portland, OR, based data recovery service?

My Seagate FreeAgent external HD may have been damaged in a move. Making clicking noises and not being detected by my computer.

Mr_Crazyhorse — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:21:11 -0800

My Seagate FreeAgent external HD may have been damaged in a move. Making clicking noises and not being detected by my computer. My Seagate FreeAgent is not being recognized by my computer and is making clicking noises and light is flickering accordingly. This is after a move where the HD

Other computers cannot recognize the drive.

There is a great deal of work-related data and my music collection on this HD. [WAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!!]

Is there any chance of physical recovery?

External hard drive problem with XP

droplet — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:47:04 -0800

Can I get my WD external hard drive back to the way it was? Last year, I bought a WD5000C032 My Book Essential 500GB external hard drive. It's plug and play, so I plugged it in, formatted it, Windows assigned it as drive I and all was good. I got XP Service Pack 3 a few weeks ago and all seemed well. Also, XP is set up to automatically update, I use CCleaner about 2x a week, and I've got AVG 7.5 as my virus detector.

Last Friday, while on my computer, I got the data write error message. I'd never seen that before. There was only one folder in it when I checked the drive. I shut down, unplugged everything and rebooted. Then I replugged. Nothing. In the device manager, it's detected as a device, but disk management doesn't detect it as a drive. GetDataBack listed the device as a 2TB drive, which it isn't. Upon starting the data retrieval procedure, it gave me an "I/O error 23," showed 10 bad sectors and then stopped responding.

I've looked up on the the Windows XP support site and on various tech forums for a solution, but none seem to work. I also downloaded the WD drive manager from the support page, ran it and nada. The drive manager doesn't even see the drive.

Am I screwed? I will have a straight-up fit if I lose the media on this drive.

Man Attempting to Move Leopard

indiewizard — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:41:38 -0800

Great MeFites, I come bearing but a humble request. I bought a MacBook Pro about six months before Leopard was released. When it finally came out, I installed it on a partition on an external drive, which I would boot from (because OS X is awesome like that, amirite?) so I could test out all my apps. Now I'm ready to commit to Leopard full-time - what's the best way to go about transplanting my Leopard partition? In my head, I would copy everything precious to the external drive, and then go into Disk Utility and select "Restore" (I'm not in front of my Mac right now, so I don't know the exact option, but it's a tab that comes up in the main pane when you select the root drive in the left-hand pane), where I would select Leopard as the source, and my internal drive as the destination. However, the internal drive is just slightly bigger than the Leopard partition - would this present a problem?

Also, what are my other options? Specifially, Carbon Copy Cloner comes to mind - is this what I need?

Also also, I would like to merge my Adium chat logs - any programs available? If this isn't possible, I'll settle for simply copying them to my Documents folder, and using Spotlight.

A thousand thank-yous in advance.

Instant search solution for an external hard drive?

greenknightwatch — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 08:54:09 -0800

Is there a desktop search solution that will index my external hard drives? So far I have had no luck with Google Desktop search.

What to see between OR and WI?

Vibrissa — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:34:56 -0800

Driving across the country: Cool places to see/things to do on Highway 12? In a couple weeks my parents and I are gonna be driving from Oregon to Wisconsin by way of the Twin Cities, probably on Highway 12 (though maybe 212 through South Dakota). What sights should we make sure to stop for?

help me see if this is a good deal

irie1972 — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:37:34 -0800

Can you tell me if this is a good harddrive and a good deal? Or even better, how would you go about finding out if its good? Thanks. From dealnews: Seagate 1TB Serial ATA 3.0Gbps Internal Hard Drive + $8 s&h ZipZoomfly.com cut its price on the Seagate 1TB Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive, model no. ST31000340AS, to $149.99. With about $8 for shipping, that's a $10 drop since last week and the lowest total price we've seen for this drive. This drive features a 32MB cache (more than most) and runs at 7200 rpm.

Scenic drive from Mpls to Chicago?

BradNelson — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:42:24 -0800

Recommend a scenic travel route from Minneapolis to Chicago. I'm driving to Chicago from Minneapolis (via my parent's near Baldwin, WI) and I have an entire day to drive, so I'd like to avoid I-94 (as I've driven it way too many times). I want to see more of the state I grew up in.

I was thinking about Hwy 61 part of the way, maybe Hwy 14, perhaps through Richland Center and Dodgeville. I don't really want to go through Madison or Milwaukee, but I'll probably hop on I-94 once I get to Illinois.

Obviously, the point of taking the scenic route, is to see interesting countryside or points of interest. So, please suggest any good ones! Also, recommendations of good eateries along the way are welcome.

Looking for things to see and do in northern Newfoundland and Labrador.

March Hare — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:30:29 -0800

Looking for things to see and do in northern Newfoundland and Labrador. I'm driving through the Atlantic provinces to Newfoundland next week. I've done the drive before, but this time I'm going to take some time and drive up the northern peninsula and maybe even take the ferry over to Labrador.

Does anyone have suggestions for things to see and do, other than the obvious like L'Anse aux Meadows?

This is not my beautiful OS.

tmcw — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 06:59:40 -0800

My fantastically unstable IBM T42 (which is on it's 3rd, soon to be 4th, life) died a little while ago, no longer booting into Ubuntu. However, it loves to boot into Windows. How do I nuke both? I'd like to run Ubuntu on this computer for another few months until it takes all of my vital data with it again. I've tried running LiveCDs to fsck the primary drive (ubuntuforums didn't care, apparently), but all of these failed. I can boot into Windows and it works fine - and I can even run some ext3 drivers/wrappers and access my linux partition from there (I have, so all of my data is now backed up). However, what I can't do is boot into any OS other than Windows. I'd like to basically wipe drive and boot partition so that I can put a new install of an OS on it - and I'm considering DBAN, although wondering if that's A) recoverable, in that the drive will still be usable B) going to fail like LiveCDs did.

Plan 2: I can get this laptop fixed under a very good warranty. Good enough that I've already gone through two hard drives and an LCD on it. However, they believe that a Windows installation is enough for any student. Not this student. So if I can just botch it up tremendously, I can get a clean slate by that method.

Thanks for any help. I'm getting a mac, and backing up my data, but to have a formerly high-end ThinkPad running XP is just a loss of potential.

How to fairly split costs on a roadtrip

biwa-shu — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:51:04 -0800

What's the fairest way to split gasoline and other costs between riders on a roadtrip? We will travel in Japan, and there are many variables in our trip, but I imagine the same information could be used in light of the rise in gas prices in north america!

-One person will incur costs traveling by train to our start point.
-We will travel by toll road.
-We will pick one person up along the way, incurring costs when we exit from the toll road. Does that rider pay the entire cost? Is he responsible for his share of our entire toll burden, or only the cost from his point of pickup?
-Also, should all riders split gasoline evenly, or only depending on how far they travel (eg: we split gas 3 ways until we pick up our 4th rider, then split it 4 ways)?

Because I own the car, I am interested in collecting as much money as I can--I have to think about oil, wear and tear, and cleaning time. Would it be fair to split the entire cost of our trip between all the riders evenly?

How many hard drives does it take, before WinXP can see them?

jadepearl — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:42:29 -0800

External hard showing "weird". Better known as, sharing an external/portable hard drive between osx and winxp. I have tried out no less than 3 of these Lacie external hard drives.

They are formatted FAT32 and register perfect on my macs at home. However on 2 WinXP machines they register as a regular drive, are listed as "full" and nothing can be loaded or read from them. This all started because they initially could not be found on the winxp though device manager "saw" them just fine and disk managment found it "healthy". I got it enabled and allocated a drive. Now it does not show in disk management. This is what I have done so far:

1) Reformatted one on a mac for pc -- still not "mounted" though seen by device manager. Forced allocation using disk management. Unable to format on the PC to NTFS after it mounted. Unable to read or write because "full" or not recognized;

2) Plugged in a "virgin" FAT32 drive after forced allocation and it can be seen but now only registering as a drive with no further info and again, "full" cannot read nor write nor found by disk management;

3) MacDrive 7 unable to find or read the drives initially until I forced allocation and again, no read nor write nor formatting. App keeps asking where the mac drive is;

WinXP service pack 2 on my machine; hard drives connected via USB 2.0; Novell Zenworks and network drives are a part of my environment.

The drives are new and Lacie is generally a reputable firm. FAT32 should be able to be read by a WinXP machine. This is a consistent problem after trying 3 drives. Any advice would be nice.

What is the highest memory capacity of USB flash drive available in the market?

omaralarifi — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:25:59 -0800

What is the highest memory storage capacity for USB portable Flash drive in the market right now? I heard that the highest right now is 64GB by BUSlink, but I am not sure if there are any higher.

Animator in need of assistance

AsRuinsAreToRome — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:06:35 -0800

Halp! Need advice on a storage solution for a man with media! So I'm having issues figuring out a hard drive setup for my personal/work network.

About my setup:

Here she is.

I'm a 3D animator. My day job is at a large animation studio in Los Angeles, CA, but at home I also do some freelance animation from my Macbook Pro C2D 17" running the latest Leopard. Right now I have two drives - a 250GB Western Digital that I use SuperDuper to nightly back up my 160GB internal Macbook Pro hard drive to. And a 500GB Western Digital MyBook which stores all my project files and media (photo library, movies, and music).

I'm quickly filling up the 500 GB Mybook and I'm looking for a cost-effective solution for what I should do with my media server. My plan is to move everything thats non-project oriented to a new 1TB drive while leaving the MyBook to run my animation files off of.

Would I benefit from getting a hard drive that supports FW800? Its seems like 99% of the enclosures or external drives I look at support USB2, but I'm looking for something that I can boot from. From my understanding, getting an eSATA card for my Express 3/4 slot isn't an option because you can't boot from external eSATA drives.

I've looked at the Drobo, which looks like a great deal but a) its expensive as hell and I'd want to use DroboShare and b) it only supports USB at this point.

Any suggestions for a stable and fast 1TB hard drive solution that would work ?

Looking for Fun Camera or Computer Projects during a Cross Country Drive

hworth — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:55:38 -0800

I'm looking for instructions, guides, or suggestions of something fun to do with my camera or laptop during an upcoming cross-country drive. In a week and a half I'll be driving from St. Louis to Southern California. I have a MacBook with OS X Tiger and a Canon Powershot SD 750. I have 5 2gb memory cards for the camera.

I wanted to do something fun with the camera or isight while on the road. Rigging up the laptop on my front seat to shoot a time-lapse video from the isight seems like the easiest option, but I'm wondering if anyone has any more interesting/complicated suggestions.

I would be happy to invest the time to learn any sort of program or skills with the camera or computer, but not looking to spend more than 50 bucks for any additional supplies. If anyone has any links to cool projects online, I'd be happy to copy someone's cool idea with my own trip as opposed to doing something original.

Also, does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to set up my laptop on my passenger seat to keep it safe and secure? I'd hate to slam on the brakes and have it smash into the dashboard.

Save my data before the disk asplode

djgh — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:21:04 -0800

My external hard-drive's on the fritz. What can I do to make sure I get all my data off it before it goes? I've got a 250GB hard drive which I put in an enclosure (cheap CompUSA one). It's got a red light and a green light. Recently, the red light will come on after a little bit and stay on (so not the blinking "transferring data" signal).

After the light comes on, the USB connection freaks out - if it's connected, it freezes, if it's not connected and I plug it in, it refuses to connect. (Disk Utility will show the drive, but not the partition. The partition refuses to mount, and the icon doesn't show up on the desktop).

What steps should I take to make sure I don't lose everything (it's my main music'n'movies drive...)?

I'm assuming that at some point it will be beneficial to pop the drive out and test in another enclosure, but assuming that doesn't work (worst case scenario and all), what should I do? i.e., the disk itself is suffering issues (plus, it's probably very good to have a backup anyway...).

I'm on OSX Tiger, if it helps, and have access to another 40GB or so (another external drive). The drive is currently sat disconnected on my shelf, not even powered.

RoadtripFilter: Fastest way to MO from NJ?

adamdrici — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:31:12 -0800

I-80 vs. I-70: Which will get me to Missouri from New Jersey with the smaller headache? I am driving out to Maryville, MO (~two hours NW of K.C.) from New Jersey this weekend. I've found two alternate routes, I-70 and I-80. Directions show them to be pretty much equal mileage and time-wise. But Google Maps never drove a car.

Anyone make a similar drive before? Suggestions on which route would be the better choice?

Thankee.

My dell hates me!

jytsai — Fri, 30 May 2008 07:58:32 -0800

I have a Dell Inspiron 600m that has a weird problem: USB flash drives aren't detected at all, but other usb devices (i.e. external usb harddrives) work perfectly fine. Clean install of Windows with updated drivers does not fix this problem. My google-fu apparently isn't sophisticated enough to dig up a solution. Ideas?

How do I teach someone to drive?

selfmedicating — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:53:56 -0800

Tips for teaching someone to drive who is not familiar with USA car culture? My friend grew up in India, came to the US for grad school, and now is looking for jobs and wants to be able to drive. I figured teaching her would be an easy task, since she has a learner's permit, and has been out driving 4-5 times before with other people.

Wrong.

As we circled an empty parking lot for a couple of hours last week at 2 mph - not using the accelerator at all yet - I had lots of time to think. And what I realized is that if you grow up in the US you have a ton of exposure to cars. You know all the street signs, to buckle up, who has right of way, etc. You've probably pretended to steer your parents car many, many times. You've played video driving games. You've fantasized and visualized about driving so much that you have a lot of mental practice before you even get behind the wheel.

We'll go out driving again next week and I'm trying to develop goals for these sessions. The first goal is to increase confidence, and make absolutely sure she is familiar with which is the brake and which is the gas.

What other goals should I think about? What do new drivers need to learn? What surprised you when you learned to drive? What is so obvious that I'm not even thinking of it? We are in the suburbs in northern Virginia, if it matters.

What to see in Ireland?

Grither — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:19:27 -0800

Driving through the northern half of Ireland next week, does anyone have any suggestions on castles, sights, breweries, or distilleries that we shouldn't miss? We're renting a car in Belfast on the 27th of May, and driving around Ireland with only a vague route of Belfast->Galway->Dublin and back to Belfast on the 1st of June.

Obviously we're going to the Guinness Brewery, and the Cliffs of Moher, but I was wondering if any Mefites had any other suggestions of great places to see that might be somewhat along the way.

We have no hostels booked other than in Belfast and Dublin, so there's definitely room for variations of the route. I don't think we'll have time to get down to Cork and more southerly points, but suggestions for there are welcome as well!

Oh, also, will a US car charger for an iPod work in a European car? Or do they have different voltages in their cigarette lighters? Do they even HAVE cigarette lighters? Thanks in advance!

Please help two drives co-exist

jonathanbell — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:24:59 -0800

SATA I or II? Hopefully very simple question about hard drives I'm looking to buy a new internal hard drive for my ageing Dell. Thing is, I'm not sure about compatability. The original drive is described as '250 GB 1st SATA' on the Dell spec sheet. My question is, would this have been Serial ATA-300 or Serial ATA-150? What's the difference? All the drives I'm looking at seem to be ATA-300. Can this co-exist with the original drive? The computer was bought in February 2004, if that helps.

Backubuntu

tmcw — Sun, 18 May 2008 15:32:24 -0800

What's the best backup solution for (Ubuntu) Linux? I need a backup as complete as possible of a home directory of ~10+ GB, nightly, etc. I have two large external USB 2.0 drives for the purpose... I know some of the options (which I'll list out), but I'm wondering which is the community favorite / most popular / most reliable / most likely to be maintained.

What I've considered: flyback, rsync, rdiff, rsnapshot, timevault, unison...

Thanks! I've gone too long without good backups, and my home directory is becoming more and more valuable. Oh, and it absolutely must backup hidden directories, although I would guess that's standard (a lot of my data is SVN repos). Something that could back up various other files (my apache configs, site-applications, etc files are fairly vital). Maybe a separate system that would do basically a drive image on a less frequent basis?

Thanks!

Bridge and an external drive?

JulianDay — Sat, 17 May 2008 13:56:47 -0800

Tools > Photoshop > Batch... doesn't work when the selected files in Bridge are on an external drive? The details: PS & Bridge CS3, MBP 10.4 w/ a FW800 drive formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Info for the drive says You can Read & Write.

When I select an image on the external drive in bridge and then try Tools > Photoshop > Batch... I get:

FatalError: General Photoshop error occurred. This functionality may net be available in this version of Photoshop.

It works fine when the files are on the local hard drive. I haven't yet tried w/ another external drive. I tried rebooting.

I searched the Adobe forums but didn't find anything.

I'm more surprised than anything that this function wouldn't work w/ external drives and I'm hoping I'm over looking something.

I just registered so I can contact Adobe, but I was wondering if anyone else has run into this.