sorry boss your dog destroyed the project ive been working on for the last two days

any way im working in final cut 5.1.4 and the dog that lives on the tour bus with us snags the power cord/usb cord for the external HD ive been using to store all my footage on and then sends my laptop flying at the same time (powerbook G4) any way the laptop's fine the hard drive still works and shows up and every project file EXCEPT the one i need to pulls up perfectly fine (also i was working on it when the dog attacked). ive gone back into my auto saves and i also saved two copies on my internal hard drive and none of them pull up anything i can do?

im starting to think the HD is toast. but the odd part is i can still access the files in finder. butr the second FCP trys to open anything from the external HD it instantly goes non-responsivei dont really want to recapture all this footage (4hrs of minidv) and try to do this project again. is there a way to transfer my captured files to a different drive and then use the project file to put them all back together again?

> im starting to think the HD is toast. but the odd part is i can still access the files in finder. butr
> the second FCP trys to open anything from the external HD it instantly goes non-responsivei

It's possible, especially consider you had actual physical, dog abuse on the hardware itself.

But I wouldn't go there quite yet, because you said this:

> every project file EXCEPT the one i need to pulls up perfectly fine

Does that mean older versions of the project, from the same hard drive, open up fine? That suggests a corruption only in the one project file (which is perfectly possible -- the one project file got corrupted when the drive and its media were disconnected by force, or even worse, the project file was writing something to disk when it happened).

Let's back up yet another step. You should not be using a USB drive -- and I'm guessing you're even using a bus-powered USB drive to edit with. Neither is a recommended approach.

> is there a way to transfer my captured files to a different drive and then use the project file to
> put them all back together again?

Yes. But only if your project file is intact and opens up okay.

"Non-responsive" may mean that you could still salvage it. Try opening the project file without the problematic external hard drive attached. If it opens up with your edits intact (but media offline), save a copy under a different name to your internal system drive, or copy everything in the project file and paste onto a blank, new project file.

Four hours of Mini-DV footage is nothing! If all else fails, just recapture -- you may end up spending more time trying to avoid it than to just bite the bullet and recapture. But, recapturing may not solve hard-drive damage or project-file corruption (you still need your editing decisions), so I wouldn't jump there for a while yet. Check the clips by copying them to an internal drive, then checking them with either FCP or QuickTime Player -- once again, with the external drive disconnected.


www.derekmok.com

First, get a crate for the dog. Then call these guys:

Drive Savers

If Finder can access the files, it's way, way too premature to be going to data recovery.


www.derekmok.com

Run Disk Warrior.

[www.alsoft.com]

I had an issue once with a drive not mounting, when a daisy chained drive accidentally dismounted another drive that was copying files.



www.strypesinpost.com

Drive savers can resuscitate almost any drive that's not physically destroyed for a tidy sum. That said, it's only two days work and you already have other autosaved versions so is $1K to $2K really worth the relatively small amount of lost time?

-Noah

Final Cut Studio Training, featuring the HVX200, EX1, EX3, DVX100, DVDSP and Color at [www.callboxlive.com]!
Author, RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera available now at: [www.amazon.com].
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"is $1K to $2K really worth the relatively small amount of lost time?"

I guess it all depends on who's tour bus he is editing on

Often drives that have suffered mechanical damage will be able to access the content structure tree because it's just a little log file that lives at the head of the drive. If you can see the layout in the finder, but cannot ACCESS any of the files (ie. open them or try moving them to another drive), it's likely your drive is toast, even if it mounts and displays the contents. Drive Savers is good, but spendy. I'd get a firewire 800 drive and start over.

If your drive doesn't respond or locks up when accessing ANY file, and makes that unhappy hard drive "spin up and ca-chunking" sound, every time you open or mount that drive you are doing further damage to it and decreasing the chances of even Drive Savers getting your data back (if that's the route you choose). Good luck!

the project files are on the internal hd of my comp its just the captured footage thats on the external hd. anyway i just opened up the project with the drive disconnected and it opened fine. and also with the drive mounted i could still write files to it and pull files from it no problem it just acts stupid when i try to use it with final cut

never mind the HD seems to be toast every time i try to copy the captured files off the drive it says error-36 file could not be read

using disk warrior now and i think its working. its bouncing from non responsive to working pretty regularly is this the final sign this drive is toast?

ALeone86, please use some punctuation and sentence breaks when posting. Texting-style run-on sentences are really hard to read in here.

> it's bouncing from non responsive to working pretty regularly is this the final sign this drive is
> toast?

Possibly, not definitively. But just the instability alone means it's time for a backup. Rescue the project files first and store them somplace safe (to preserve editing decisions -- and because project files copy very quickly). Then backup your media.


www.derekmok.com

yup, Disk Warrior might be able to smooth out software problems, but my bet is you have hardware damage. If DW has allowed you to access and move files, get them off that drive as fast as you can. I just had this happen to a drive of mine, exactly same symptoms (including error message), and every time you try and access files, hear the drive spin up and then suddenly STOP with a 'ca-chunk' sound you are scratching that disk internally.

Another clue is if you watching the data transfer and it holds at a transfer rate, then starts to slow WAY down, then picks back up again. Derek is totally right, the drive may not be dead, but you should get that stuff off as quickly as you can.

good luck!

thanks for the help guys and ill be sure to use better punctuation in the future.