Directory corruption issues? (a little OT)

Hey all --

So I am experienceing a particular mystery. Over the last 3 weeks, I have had several external FW drives seem to go south on me. I have not had this problem at all in over a year, then suddenly, one after the other. (They are good drives too...) Sometimes they unmounted themselves, other times they would be fine, then would suddenly not be readable upon reboot. Disk Utility doesn't really help out too much.

Using DiskWarrior, I found that in all cases, the directory somehow gets corrputed. After rebuilding the directory, everything comes back again (except once, where half the media was corrupted or damaged in the rebuild).

It happens across FW400 and FW800. I replaced the cables, same thing. I had a diagnostic done on the machine, everything turned up fine. I frequently run Cocktail, and I rebuilt my hard drive (reinstalled the OS and all applications) about 10 months ago. I have a G5 Dual 2, 3.5GB RAM, OSX 10.4.10, FCP 5.1.4, KonaLH card.

Has anyone experienced this before? Any advice?

thanks so much
Karl

Hi karl

Well that sounds bad. Very sorry to hear. All this happened in last 3 weeks? Several FW drives? Sounds like you've done all the usual fixes. Did this happen after an update? Maybe 10.4.10?

Michael Horton
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Hi Mike --

Yeah, just kinda out of the blue. It happened to 4 FW drives. Only once did I seriously lose media. The other times the directory rebuild restored everything.

10.4.10 I believe was the update done by the service shop. I experienced this problem again this morning w/10.4.10, after the diagnostic was done, physical system cleaning, etc. Also, my boot drive also is almost 50% unused, so I don't think it's that.

The service shop scratched their heads too. I asked them to specifically check the Firewire ports after the first test, still, no problems to report. The only thing I can think of is *maybe* there's some tiny little cancer inside the machine that diagnostic can't pick up. This G5 is, after all, almost 5 years old and I use it just about every day. I'd hate to start randomly replacing things, or buy a whole new system, before a diagnosis of the problem... that would suck.

thanks
Karl

Scratching my head too. If you re-installed OS then it would not seem possible its a software issue. I'd naturally point to the FW ports too as cause but if nothing comes up, then... If this all started happening at once then to pin point what was done before it all happened would be the key to solving the problem. Sure seems like a hardware issue though.

Michael Horton
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Karl,

Were these drives "daisey chained" together? That might be the reason it was a cascading failure.

Hey John --

Two of them were "second" in a chain, two of them were connected directly. It never happened to more than one drive at the same time though.

thanks
k

What brand of drives are they? Has it been especially hot where you are recently? Any new large equipment installed anywhere? Electrical surges in the building?

Hi Jude --

Three of four are the drives which Melrose Mac builds. Blackstar or Ice cases, and inside is whatever Melrose Mac normally puts inside (Seagate, Macpower, whatever they put in them). And one of them was a LaCie D2 (that one I was not particularly shocked by).

No new equipment or anything. Electrical is running through a UPS, but you never know... that's a good thought. I don't think heat is an issue -- I am in LA and it has been hot but I have a fan cooling the drive bays all the time.

I don't really know what else it could possibly be except for some microscopic something, either in the OS or the hardware. I will probably rebuild my boot drive anyway -- they say every six months, so I guess I'm due.

I am curious though -- regarding regular maintenance, I never manually do anything related to viruses or spyware or anything like that. Could this be some sort of virus?

thanks
k

Unlikely to be a virus - there's still no known virii in the wild for OSX. A couple of 'proof of concepts', but these pretty much have to be installed locally, and the common feeling is if you've got local access, you may as well just drag things to the trash and delete them, not write a virus.

This is a long shot, since it relates to Lacies, but I have seen them fall offline when a mobile phone sitting nearby rings. New phone? New mobile phone tower in the district?

Have you installed anything new - even something small, like fruity menus?

I've experienced this many times with Lacie and twice with Ice cased HDDs

Over filling with content (leaving less than 10% drive space) and over heating are the 2 main culprits in this sort of thing. Occasionally its down to a corruption due to power spikes/outage, disconnecting the HDD without ejecting/unmouting from desktop or hardware failure of the mech/psu/interface.

Try running the drives with a desktop fan blowing cold air over the drive thats most likely to corrupt (probably the Lacie) and see if its a heat issue.

Neither the LaCie D2 or ice cases have fans to cool the HDDs so you need to have a cool ambient temperature to run them for long periods as their cases are terrible at dispersing heat away from the mechanisms.

Some Ice drives use IBM/Mitsubishi mechs which are usually the most reliable ones but NOT if they overheat.

I would seriously look to investing in a RAID case with internal cooling fan(s) you could take the HDDs from the other cases and use them in something like these:

[www.span.com]

[www.cooldrives.com]


When you format them do them HFS+ without Journalling.

Make sure you have a spike/surge protector plug or multiplug for your system and if you think power outage could be an issue, get a UPS - uninterrupted power supply.

[www.mgeups.com]

Lastly it could be your power supply to the equipment. If the ring main circuit isn't supplying enough power to run all your system adequately then your drives are usually the first things to mess up. I've seen this on many occasions at facilities where they add and add hardware but forget to check the total power needed to run them all. Get an electrician to check for you.



Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Hi Ben, Jude etc --

Thanks so much for all your thoughts and advice. Most of what Ben talked about I have covered -- I run a fan over all my drives no matter what kind they are, they go through a UPS, etc. I do usually dismount all external drives before shutting down the system. If someone could direct me to a link which describes the safest mounting and dismounting methods (i.e. do you turn the drive on before starting up the system or after?) that would be helpful, just so I can be sure I'm not messing things up.

For some reason I am suspecting the boot drive as a possible culprit. I don't think I download any fruity widgets or anything, but I am connected to the internet and you never know. So, I have been working for the last few days from a bootabe Firewire drive with absolutely no problem. This morning I attempted to start up the system using the internal boot drive (which I wiped and rebuilt, by the way). The very first thing that happened was that my external firewire drives showed up in Disk Utility, but could not be mounted (visible on the desktop). Once I dismounted them through Disk Utility and re-powered the drives, they showed up again. But one of them had a piece of media simply missing, disappeared.

Although I will reconfigure the electrical portion of my drives again, I wonder what this new information might mean to anyone. If I have a completely wiped and rebuilt internal hard drive and similar problems are coming up, but these problems have NOT come up using an external boot device... could there be something physically wrong with the internal drive itself that is causing these problems? In other words, could these problems logically be connected to a physically faulty boot device, or should they not be related?

Thanks guys...
karl

It could be a hardware issue of the HDD or the Mac - unfortunately I'm not the best person to advise on fixing hardware - you'd better off going to a specialist and asking them to check the connections, motherboard, etc.

Is your internal HDD a Maxtor?

However you could check the Internal HDD in an external case (if you have one spare). Have you tried using a different internal HDD?

As far as mounting unmounting

Connecting: Plug in Firewire/USB device to mac then turn on Firewire/USB device

Disconnecting: eject (if necessary wait for the HDD spin down) and icon is no longer on desktop then turn off and unplug.

For eSATA: plug in and power on before turning on Mac

For disconnect: shutdown the Mac then turn off and unplug.

You can hotswap eSATA like firewire but it is more temperamental than Firewire so stick to the safe route above.


If you shutdown your Mac wait until all the HDDs spin down (including external drives) then switch off mains power.



Ben



For instant answers to more than one hundred common FCP questions, check out the LAFCPUG FAQ Wiki here : [www.lafcpug.org]

Hey guys --

Yeah, this was like a month ago, but I thought I would follow up just in case anyone was curious. I ended up replacing the internal boot drive with a new one, and reloaded the OS and all the programs. I have not had any more of these strange external hard drive problems. It is true, I did have a LaCie completely die on me last week, but the symptoms were different and, well, it's a LaCie, and that's happened to me before... anyway, no more weird stuff after replacing the internal hard drive. I don't think I'll ever know what the problem was, but it seems to be solved for now.

Just to be safe, I am not writing this post on my Mac -- the minute I type "no more problems," it'll probably implode into nothingness like the house did in POLTERGEIST.

Thanks for all your help, guys!

best
Karl