Media 100 HDe – External drive problems.

[Andrew Mehta]

Hope the second hand Sonnet case ends up helping.

Because of my lack of knowledge on striped arrays of hard disk drives, I’ll try and share your post with others that may know more…unless you’ve had some luck since you first posted, and you’ve got things working again?

My fear, of course, is hard drive failure.
When you first noticed problems, you should have backed up to new drives.
Am guessing a 3TB drive would have done, and these aren’t too expensive these days.
However, you did say you couldn’t afford to upgrade, so I don’t know what your budget is.

Sorry I’m not much help. Floh is a world of knowledge, and may appear shortly with some tips.

In the meanwhile, I’m going to share your post on the Media 100 Facebook Group, and see if anyone there has any advice that may help.

Yours,
Andrew.

[Chris Barrett]

Andrew – thanks for your thoughts – well I’m stupid because I did buy a 3 Tb toshiba USB drive and started backing up but I’m never sure how Media 100 stores rendered media etc and just trying to copy files seems a bit hit and miss. I should have continued of course but found other things to repair like the car (rats eat the harness) and odd electrical things here in Spain where it seems every day something goes wrong.
Well my ‘Andrew and wife’ are passing here in a few hours from UK and are bringing the spare Sonnet case which I hope reads the drives and if so, when I have stopped giving thanks to whoever ! I will start backing it up !!! Promise – if I’m let off from drive fail this time !!

Of course prices of these bits of hardware have come down over the years – this existing Mac and Media 100 set up cost me about £7000 and I see that Media 100 is now a free download but needs a £3000 Mac to run it ?
Crossing fingers.
Just to show you how hard life is here perhaps this is visible https://youtu.be/ADj0zz6ScNg
Chris

Believe what I see!

[Chris Barrett]

Hi Bob and Andrew, friends from England dropped off Sonnet case and after a coffee I have plugged in my drives and turned on – hallelujah and all that – they lit up and appeared on the desktop as normal. You can imagine I am very relieved. The case has been a bit changed – suspect it was in a rack or something – feet missing – the locks broken (to remove drives without keys I suppose) and the bottom drive front lights are dead ( wires ?) BUT it appears ok. Now I am going to be a good boy and back up my 2.5Tb of stuff to my Toshiba USB drive (3Tb)

I will get round to ordering the drive Bob suggested although they seem to be more available in the States.

So your knowledge was spot on and I imagine the ‘chip set problem’ is in the drive case ?

I think I have mixed forum topics or a separate one has started so will copy this to the other.

Thanks again – this is all good knowledge although there probably aren’t many others out there as out of date as I am – but at least I benefit from all that hard won experience.

Chris

Believe what I see!

[Andrew Mehta]

Great to hear things worked out! ????

Andy Worth had also chipped in with the following on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/Media100Suite/permalink/1887103257985835/

“I used to be a tech around that time, but my memory isn’t exact so hopefully some of this helps. I think it would have come with disks, but they were rarely the latest version so I used to install from a download. I would assume the system is on a single drive with the sonnet array only used as a media drive so hopefully doesn’t need the installer to reinstall system drive? Personally I found the sonnet cases not as good as other cases, with the most common problems being the card in the cases dying. if he replaces case hopefully that will fix problem. Other wise there may be another solution. maybe his is different and contains a RAID controller, but some were just JBODS with a the PCI card just being an esata bus controller. The RAID 0 stripe was done by software. If that is the case he can plug the drives in internally, as long as the computer can see the drives with or without the the sonnet controller/case. if im wrong and it is a RAID controller, (which for just RAID 0 would be weird and unnecessary) then he will only be able to read the drives with a sonnet controller/case setup. it just depends on whats controlling the RAID stripe.”

[Chris Barrett]

I tried to read individual drives with a SATA USB cable into the mac but it didn’t see any of the five drives so I imagine they are set up as a raid or whatever the system is and cannot be accessed. Now I am backing up my Media 100 rendered stuff to the Toshiba but it won’t let me do it in one action – says I don’t have admin permissions for some items even though the Sonnet is read and write without permissions and is format Mac Os extended or some such . So I am doing it folder by folder and although I checked on the internet I could not see any way round it. Just glad to be able to use it all again !

Believe what I see!

[Andrew Mehta]

Some modern versions of MacOS don’t allow you to do much with files or folders stored at the root of the hard drive; Prefering to only allow you to do stuff with things in your user folder.

Which version of MacOS / OSX do you run?

To get around this, it’s usually a simple matter of going into Finder and selecting the file or folder on your hard drive that you want to access – in our case the “Media 100 Media Folders” folder -, bringing up its “Get Info” window (APPLE+i), and changing the permissions on that folder to allow you to do stuff with it (read & write).

Alternatively you can use programs like Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your hard drive to another hard drive, or just clone it to a folder on a hard drive. CCC is commercial software, but has a free month’s trial, and even lets you open it a few times after that, mercifully. https://bombich.com/