External enclosure; how to tell if drive is about to die?

[Paul Soderman]

I've had a backup drive (Western Digital) in an external firewire enclosure
(Mobile Disk External Data Storage) running fine for a couple of years on my
G4 running OS 9.2.2, with loads of RAM. In the past week, I've been getting
messages that I should run a disk utility on the drive; then the drive
simply doesn't mount, upon booting, with the message that the drive is
unreadable, want to initialize etc. coming on.

I've run Nortons and Hard Drive Toolkit and TechTool Pro, and the disk was
fixed of any problems, but lately I get the messages again and the disk
won't mount. I have a feeling that there'd be nothing wrong with the drive
itself, since no new data was put on it, and that the problem may be with
the external drive enclosure itself, although I don't know why that would
be.

Is this the sort of thing that happens to a hard drive when it is about to
go belly up? Anything I can do (other than backing up data) if that's the
case?

Thanks for any help.

Paul

[Yet Another John]

In article <BC5A71F9.C864%Kidp...@comcast.net>,
Paul Soderman <Kidp...@comcast.net> wrote:

You didn't say whether or not you have used Apple's Disk Utility on the
drive. You probably have already done so, but if you haven't it
certainly wouldn't hurt. Like you I try to have as many tools as
possible to attack HD problems.

Second tactic would be to rewrite the driver to that external HD by
opening the disk utility you used when you installed the system on your
G4.

It is possible that the drive isn't spinning up on startup. In the old
days of SCSI drives if a HD didn't spin up in time to answer querries
from the startup system it couldn't mount. But with firewire even a late
spinning drive should be recognized if it isn't damaged and the driver
is intact.

or....your drive could be getting ready to die.

Good luck.

--
Use plasma destruct ray on address to reply via email.