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Harddrive failure when rendering in FCP7
Please can anybody help.
I am a video editor new to the Mac world, having left PC’s after yet another failure.
I have an iMac i5 with 4Gb RAM, using MAC OS X 10.6.3 (Cannot connect it to the internet due to the our location). I Edit with FCP 7, having though that this would be as good as Adobe Premier (which it is).
However, i have had a problem with two external USB harddrives, both formatted OS X extended. At different times, one a few months ago, and one today, they have crashed or something, when rendering in FCP, followed by an error message saying “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer appears”.
In DiskUtility, the Samsung G3 Station Media icon is ok, but the partition now is a light grey and says “disk1s1”.
If i click on the information there is very little information, the most noticable feature being that the Mount Point : Not Mounted.
Is there anyway to get this drive back? I have very little Mac experience, having jumped in (Foolishly?) a the deep end. -
3 Replies
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Open Disk Utility and choose First Aid (near the top of the window) – you should see two buttons at the lower right side called “Verify Disk” and “Repair Disk” – you probably need to do a “Repair Disk” to bring it back.
I’ve seen pretty much the same thing (I can’t remember the precise error message, but what you’ve written sounds similar) after unplugging a USB drive without unmounting it first (I got it back after a bit of fiddling with the Disk Utility).
BTW, usb drives are handy and cheap for backing up data, but you shouldn’t use them as media drives for editing. Firewire or eSata is much more reliable (not just because of the speed, but I’m told that there’s something about the way usb works which makes it unsuitable for digitising or rendering [something about undefined file sizes???] which TBH is beyond my technical knowledge but confirmed by my experience). I expect someone will be able to either confirm or refute that…
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Thanks, will try that and see what happens.
I know that Firewire or eSATA is better, but, how do you connect a Firewire drive to an iMAC if you want to capture video through the Firewire Port and how would you connect an eSATA drive to an iMAC. Probably one of those dumb questions? -
Not a dumb question at all. Apple, in all its wisdom, has decreed you didn’t need to do that with that computer so you can’t. You get your one FW plug and no eSATA connectivity. You get Thunderbolt, but I’ve only seen one drive from LaCie with that connection as of yet. Hitachi were planning a Thunderbolt G-Raid but I’m not sure if it’s shipping yet. You need a MacPro to get more FW and a PCIe card in there to get eSATA. You could split your FW through a hub, but you’ll be asking a whole lot from your poor FW buss while digitizing.
If you’re going to be working seriously with many drives on Mac OS, it might be worth looking into DiskWarrior. It’s a drive maintenance and repair software that goes beyond what Disk Utility can do. It solves most drive errors I’ve ever encountered in Mac OS that weren’t mechanical. https://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/
IHTH,
JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com
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