Is my disk drive gone

yesterday as I was editing I setup my Sony PD170 to capture some voice over scratch track audio on a LACIE 500gig drive which was partioned. Upon testing and setting up the voice over tool I turned on and off the camera to record the vo at one point in this setup proecss the image in the canvas window broke up and resemble a disassembled cross word puzzle. I have been unable to locate the material in the drive and am wondering if I inadvertently crashed the disk dirve and lost my media in the disk volumn. I left if alone last night and will resume later today...hoping for a way to save this project any suggestions from the experts. Or has the bell tolled and I have to recreate and capture everything ffrom scratch that was not backedup in another disk drive.
Thanks
Ogaz

Did you daisy-chain the camera to the drive? Very bad practice.

I saw this problem years ago at my film school. With an older Sony DV deck (DSR-20, I think) using FireWire, when a FireWire drive is hooked up to the computer at the same time as the deck, on the same set of buses, whenever the deck's auto-off kicks in, it sends some kind of signal to the drive that fries the directory of the drive and corrupts concurrently open project files. DiskWarrior was what we had to use to rescue the drives.

If you're forced to hook up a camera and a drive without a separate FireWire card on your computer, don't ever turn off the camera with the drive mounted -- dismount it, turn it off and disconnect the drive first.

If you damage or change the FireWire service at the exact instant that the computer is trying to write to or manage data on the drive, then that drive data and structure will become damaged or corrupted.

This makes daisy chaining devices in video service a really bad idea.

See: Disk Warrior

Koz