Mounting problem hard drive
Invader Zim
to use as a system backup for my Mac Mini. I believe the drive was
made around 2003, when 80 GB was a large drive. I was trying to clone
the OS from a 250 GB onto this 80 GB drive. There was only around 30
GB of files on the 250 GB drive so I didn't think there would be a
problem. I tried recent versions of both CC Cloner and Super Copy for
the clone attempts.
I had cloned this 250 GB drive once before onto a different drive with
no problem, but with this 80 GB drive there was a problem. When I
tried to clone the drive, around 20 GB would copy, then the process
would just stop. The readout showing the amount copied would move no
more. After waiting half an hour more, I would give up and do a force
quit. But the computer would still be frozen so I had to force-quit
the computer and reboot.
Before the cloning difficulty there were three drives showing on the
desktop, the internal boot drive, the 250 GB source drive and the 80 GB
object drive. After the clone attempt and force quit, I rebooted and
there were only two drives on the desktop, the boot drive and the 250
GB source drive.
So, when the 80 GB drive wouldn't mount, I first tried Disk Utility,
but it wouldn't show the 80 GB drive. I tried Disk Warrior, after I
upgraded from 4.0 to 4.2; it did not show the 80 GB drive either. I
tried Drive Genius 2, with no luck. You can't do a repair if you can't
see the drive.
I had one method left that I had used successfully a couple of years
ago when a drive crashed every time I tried to copy a particular file
onto it. I cannot say whether it was or was not the same drive. But
the solution was to connect it to my Mac G4 on which I still have OS 9
as one of the startup volumes. I boot under OS 9 and it shows the
message "Unrecognizable drive: 1) Eject, 2) Erase." I choose Erase
since that is the only satisfactory option. I then put the drive back
on my Mac Mini, which now mounts it. I then erase it which reformats
it with GUID. I used Drive Genius to do a surface check on the drive
and it did not show any problems.
I tried cloning several times; most of the time I was using a Mac Mini
with Snow Leopard, but I also tried it on my other Mac mini with Tiger
OS and different Firewire cables. After each failure, I tried reducing
the number of files on the source drive, eliminating the largest files
especiallly. Finally when the source drive got down to a little less
than 20 GB, with no files over 1 GB, the cloning succeeded.
My real question is not so much why the cloning failed so many times
(though I would be interested in any thoughts), but is there a more
reliable method of mounting a problem hard drive, including using the
Terminal if appropriate? Newer Macs do not even run OS 9. If I didn't
have it available, I would not have known any other solution.
Thanks for any ideas and sorry for the long length.
--
Etaoin Shrdlu
Kevin McMurtrie
defective USB and Firewire adaptors. They'd randomly lock up during
use, especially if accessing multiple files at once.
I wouldn't trust the drive if it has been spinning all this time.
Mechanical stress causes the media to crack after about 5 years.
Occasionally there are batches of bad hard drives where the media cracks
in less than 2 years. This is why RAID is so popular for backups - you
can swap in a new disk every few years and let the RAID automatically
rebuild itself. Make sure you get one that does periodic verification.
In article <260220110517531593%z...@archon.net>,
Invader Zim <z...@archon.net> wrote:
I will not see posts from Google or e-mails from Yahoo because I must
filter them as spam
Invader Zim
noted that there were problems back then, but mainly with 800 drives
while I have only used 400 drives. But it was mentioned that they
hadn't sorted it out altogether at that time and there could be other
defective drives.
Thanks for the tip.
In article <4d69629e$0$22175$742e...@news.sonic.net>, Kevin McMurtrie