error -2048?

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

This sounds like some kind of disk issue which is preventing QuickTime from recognizing valid movie content in your captured media. This could be a case of a corrupt directory structure or alternatively a hardware problem.

If you have DiskWarrior, use it to rebuild a new directory structure for your LaCie disk. Then choose to Preview the repairs before you replace the directory structure. This will not modify your disk in any way and you should be able to copy your captured media from the LaCie drive to another location, eg the internal hard disk or another disk array. If you do this and the computer still crashes, then you might be looking at a hardware problem.

If you don’t have DiskWarrior, launch Disk Utility and use it to “Verify Disk” on the LaCie disk. Does it report any errors? If so, quit and get hold of a copy of DiskWarrior 3.0.3. You could attempt to use Disk Utility to repair the damage but the problem sounds serious and once you start a repair with Disk Utility, you can’t easily reverse the process if the repair fails. DiskWarrior enables you to access the disk without modifying it which is great when a disk is on the edge of being salvagable or lost.

If Disk Utility does not report any errors, or if DiskWarrior crashes during the repair, or if DiskWarrior is successful but then the Mac crashes when copying the files, then a hardware problem is likely. We’ll worry about that if it happens but one thing you could try is plugging your LaCie disk in to another Mac and see if you have any more luck copying the file.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Tad Newberry]

thanks Luke. here’s a little more info, but in the meantime i’ll try what you’ve said…

the drive seemed to be working fine until i tried bringing these QT files back to my main media drive. also, the files show up in the Finder as “QuickTime movies”, but won’t play in QT nor will they reconnect to my FCP project. strangely, this is only happening in one folder, as i have another folder full of QT movies on the same LaCie drive that are playing fine right off the drive. it’s as if this one folder got corrupted somehow. does this happen very often? is there some sort of “approved method” for moving QT files from my main media drive to the LaCie drive so this doesn’t happen again?

thanks for helping out a bonehead,

jtn

[Tad Newberry]

also, i should’ve asked earlier, will running either of these utilities further corrupt any of the data on the drive? obviously, i realize if i reformat i’ll lose everything, but assume the testing should be fine…

thanks for helping out a bonehead,

jtn

[Tad Newberry]

Disk Utility reported no problems. Here is the report i received:

1 HFS volume checked
Volume passed verification

i don’t have any handy access to another Mac right now, so what might be the hardware issues you refer to?

thanks for helping out a bonehead,

jtn

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Mortimer,

Given that Disk Utility did not report any problems, then it is unlikely that directory structure corruption is the cause of your problem. A corrupt directory structure could make it difficult to access files in a particular folder or group of folders but in which case I would expect Disk Utility to detect the problem.

My guess is that you have bad blocks, or some other hardware probelm, with the LaCie drive. It would definitely be worth trying to use the drive with another Mac to see if you can successfully copy the troublesome QuickTime movies to another disk. If so, then try opening them.

If this is not successful, then I recommend you salvage any important files from the drive and then consider reformatting it. If you have a utility that can run a bad block test, then try using it. Under Mac OS 9, there was a free Apple utility named Drive Setup which could perform a bad block test. There are also third party utilities for Mac OS X that run bad block tests although some are more thorough than others. There is a risk of lost data during a bad block test so only conduct it if you have already salvaged whatever data you can.

If bad blocks are found even after the reformat of the drive, then replace the drive as the problem is likely to grow worse. Bad blocks are a fairly common problem and might be covered under a drive warranty.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design