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Case of the Missing Hard Drive
This Easter weekend I am ‘re-capturing’ 33 hours of video to an editing project I have spent several months creating. It all began…in Premiere Pro CS3, where I carefully backed up all 6 projects (which will become ‘chapters’ in a 50 minute program.) The one thing I did NOT do was back up the Western Digital ‘My Book’ 5oo gb external (Y:) drive, which held all of my imported footage (and which was very full!) A couple of hours before completion of the entire project the external drive disappeared, when I booted up. It was there in the line-up, but would not load any files.
Here’s the crazy part, it still acts normal, that is, I can hear it spinning (quiet as usual, no noises) and the blue light says it’s functioning properly. It showed up with all the rest of the drives, but when I first tried opening it I kept getting ‘Y:is not acessible. Error Performing Inpage Operation’. After many hours of searching forums (including the Cow) I learned a few tricks, which I tried. Such as:
1. Start > Run > type in cmd then click OK to get a command prompt.
2. Type in chkdsk y: /rThat check ran fine, and it allowed me to at least open the drive up, but alas no files appeared…none. I tried running the same pgm again, but then I got a message saying ‘Cannont Open Volume For Direct Access’. I then checked the Y: drive ‘properties’ and it says the harddrive has O used space and O free space & capacity O bytes.
I tired running tools ‘error checking’, but of course nothing happened.
I also purchased ‘Recover My Files’, but that did nothing, although it appears to be a good program for recovering regular deleted files. (The program did not recognize my F: drive in its line-up, so it could not look for files to recover.)
I’ve tried using different USB & Firewire cables, on two computers, to no avail.
When I tried to de-frag the Y: drive it was not on the list of drives, so I could not try defragging. The drive was probably too full to degrag anyway. And, that may be part of the problem.
Oh yes, somewhere in this process I got “windows was unable to save all the data for the file Y:Mft. The data was lost…” And, now I’m geting a message asking me if I want to ‘format the drive’.
And yet, ‘Autoplay’ still runs for a short time whenever I change a cable or reboot the computer, so the drive ‘acts’ like its loading files etc.
As of yet, I have not tried to write anything to the drive. This problem has me baffled. I’m sure I have a major problem with the Y: drive, that’s why I’m spending Easter weekend re-capturing the original footage. I’m naming each Mini-DV reel exactly as the original files and they seem to be loading into the project okay…so far. I’m hoping to re-build the project this very ardous way. Of course, in the future, I WILL be making a back-up copy of my source drive too!
If anyone happens to have an idea of what this particular problem might be, I’d sure appreciate some information.
Thanks…and, Happy Easter!
Wendall
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6 Replies
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The Mybook drives are cheap, and the 2 I ever bought eventually died on me.
Well, one was recovered by taking it out of its external case and using it as an internal drive, and that may be something you can try.
But the fact that it asked you to format would instead usually mean that you have corrupted boot records, and that should be something that can be fixed by recovery software.
You could try a trial of EZ Recovery.
It’s not cheap to buy, but the trial will tell you if it can be recovered.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Thanks for the quick response Vince. Much appreciated. I hadn’t thought about ‘corrupted boot records’. I was hoping the recovery software I purchased would have taken care of a problem like that, but I’ll give EZRecovery a try and see what happens. I may eventually take the drive out of its external case and give it an internal try.
Actually thinking back, prior to purchasing the recovery software, I downloaded a trial of HDD Regenerator. I didn’t let it test the entire drive, because it was extremely slow, but it did return an immediate message saying ‘8 delays were detected’. I’m not sure if that means anything.
Very perplexing.
Wendall
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I have seen power supplies and power strips cause more problems with external drives than the drives themselves.
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I didn’t know that. That’s another consideration. Looks like I’m learning all this the hard way. Thanks Mike.
Wendall
Filmmaker42
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Wendall –
I’ve been editing video on a computer for over 13 years and have always left at least 25% of my media/data drive to allow for Windows swap files ( part of the Windows OS ) to have room to do their thing as well as being able to defrag the drives. Another potential problem is the fact you are using a very small ( in regards to the data needs of your project. Also I wouldn’t be using a USB external drive for editing – you can do it – but it can and does cause problems to your workflow. If you can get to the data files using the recovery software – my recommendation would be to delete ( or move to another drive ) all files not part of this project – If you free up the space for your system to work properly life should be much better for you
I have been very successful lately using esata external drives such as Lacie’s 4Big Quadro – 2 terabytes of blazing fast storage that can be set in various raid formats including Raid 0,1,3, and 5. -
Thanks for the insight David. You gave some sound advice and I apreciate it. I’m wondering if the 500 GB external drive, that’s given me all this trouble, is just too full for Windows swap files, boot roecords etc to do their job. I have no way of seeing if any files exist, because the recovery programs don’t seem to recognize it. Consequently, I can’t move any other files from the drive. So, I’m between the devil and the deep blue sea…or, more likely in The Twilight Zone!
At any rate, earlier today I finally finished my marathon weekend and re-capatured approximately 29 hours of video. A few AVI’s, on another external drive, survived.
Regarding using a USB external drive for editing, I agree totally. Unfortunately, that’s all I had to work with when I began this project 6 months ago (my other drives were tied up with other projects.) In fact, I jsut installed an ‘internal’ 1 terabyte harddrive a couple of weeks ago and THIS time I ‘re-captured’ all the AVIs to it. So far, the project recognizes about 95 percent of the AVI’s. Now I’m rebuilding the other 5 per cent.
I’m glad do know about the Lacie’s 4Big Quadro, because after this fiasco I’m going get something more stable!
Thanks again for your input.
Wendall
Filmmaker42
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