"firewire drive has stopped responding"

I had to leave my system, which is using FCP 3 and OS 9.2.2, overnight to render something. It's at the home of the director I'm working with. I instructed him to shut the system down when he saw that the render was complete. However, before he could do so, a message came up saying "A firewire drive has stopped repsponding. The problem must be corrected to avoid damage to the disk's contents" or something very similar. I have had this happen before, as there's something funky in one of the firewire ports on one of the drives, and the solution has been to power down, reconfigure the daisy-chaining of the drives, and power back up. So far I haven't ever lost any disk's contents. BUT.... this time the system was left unattended for hours, so who knows how long ago the disk stopped responding? It's been shut down now, but I won't be able to go over there until tomorrow midday. I am basically unable to sleep, worrying that the drive or drives have been corrupted by this, even though that hasn't happened so far. Does anyone have experience with this? What kind of damage can get done to the drive's contents?

If it happened during a render, chances are you've lost render files, and also it's possible that the interruption of the on-going render has mucked with the project file.

Painful solution: Do NOT save the project file no matter what. You want to prevent further writing to your file and try to preserve what you had before you started the render.

First order of business is to BACK UP your project file, to an external source other than your FireWire drive. Again, there's a chance it may have been corrupted -- check it. If it's intact, play back your cut to make sure no other media has been compromised. Once that's ascertained, it's a simple matter of re-rendering.

Rendering tip: When you have a super-long render -- anything longer than 30 minutes, to me, is a long render -- cancel it every 15-20 minutes so you can save your project file. That way, the render files created up to that point will be linked to your project file and you won't have to render those parts again. By contrast, if a render operation goes on for six hours uninterrupted and something happens (eg. your FireWire drive problem) which prevents you from saving your project file, the next time you open the project, it will still be completely unrendered -- six hours of work down the drain.

I've had the "stopped responding" message several times and I've never lost any data (I have very stable drives, well maintained). However, that doesn't mean you're always safe. Apply due diligence to protect your editing work. Good luck.

Is there a Lacie in this mix? They seem to have a problem with falling asleep and no longer being recognised by the computer they are connected to. I think there is a firmware upgrade you can get for them that is supposed to help. Check the lacie website.

Hi,

There's no Lacie, they are all Rocstors, the new Firewire 800's. We have had this problem every time we've added a drive. The old Rocstors seem very solid, but these new ones seem to have some sort of strange port corruption on every drive I've bought. There seem to be some very weird things that happen depending on what order you daisychain everything in. I still haven't figured out why it's happening; will be replacing all the cables tomorrow. Everything was working fine the day before, but I temporarily attached a drive I am using for back-up. I usually unmount and disconnect this drive immediately after dumping stuff onto it, but this time I left it plugged in, and now, even with it disconnected, I am having this "stopped responding" problem. Maybe it's just a freak coincidence, and a cable went. I ended up losing only the render file.

As for the idea Derekmok mentioned of hitting "cancel" and starting the render over: can you do that when you're outputting a Final Cut Pro movie? It seems like every time it stops there has been no file created. I am going to break the project into reels once I get this drive issue solved, so that if there's a problem it will only affect 15 minutes of the movie instead of the whole 90.

No - you can't stop when outputting a fcp movie, only during renders, because it will remmeber a partial render, but not a partial encode.

I've only ever seen the 'stopped responding' thing on lacies but possibly its the same kind of thing. If you shut everything down and *don't* reconfigure the chaining of the drives, what happens when you restart? Is it the chain or the restart that is fixing it?