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hard drive troubleshooting help needed

J

jimtron

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 27, 2008
91
4
I've got an internal Seagate 3TB drive I've been using with my MBP, with an external enclosure and dock. It's been flaky: it often "ejects" on its own, especially when I'm transferring files.

I've run Diskwarrior on it--no problems shown. I've tried USB and FW docks and enclosures (3 different ones), and same thing happens. At first I though it might be the MBP, but I've since tried other drives I have that are working fine. I've had drives fail before, but this seems different. Every time I lose the connection, and reconnect, the drive is fine and doesn't show problems with Disk Utility or DW.

Any advice on how to diagnose this? I'd like to try and clone the drive, but not sure I'll be able to do that considering what's going on. I do have the contents backup on optical discs, but they're in a different state so I'd like to at least try to recover this drive.
 
jimtron said:
I've got an internal Seagate 3TB drive I've been using with my MBP, with an external enclosure and dock. It's been flaky: it often "ejects" on its own, especially when I'm transferring files.

I've run Diskwarrior on it--no problems shown. I've tried USB and FW docks and enclosures (3 different ones), and same thing happens. At first I though it might be the MBP, but I've since tried other drives I have that are working fine. I've had drives fail before, but this seems different. Every time I lose the connection, and reconnect, the drive is fine and doesn't show problems with Disk Utility or DW.

Any advice on how to diagnose this? I'd like to try and clone the drive, but not sure I'll be able to do that considering what's going on. I do have the contents backup on optical discs, but they're in a different state so I'd like to at least try to recover this drive.
Click to expand...

If it has content on it that is not backed up, I would get another drive and clone this one to it before anything else.

Since you have tried different enclosures and FW and USB you have ruled connection problems out. Drive DX (available from MAS) will give a really detailed analysis of your drive, and may point to the problem.

EDIT...another candidate...has your testing included different power supply units. I think it possibly has, but the behaviour you describe is typical of power supply problems.

(BTW surprised to hear you back up a 3Tb HD to optical disks, blu-ray I assume. Optical has the advantage that it can't be changed, but that is the disadvantage too...you can't update it.)
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the reply. If I'm not able to clone the drive, I was wondering if the problem could be with the PC card (or what do you call the green board on the back)? I have another Seagate 3TB drive, but not the exact same model...wondering 1) could that possibly solve the problem, and 2) are those pretty easy to swap out? and 3) if that's something that might work, do the drives have to be the exact same model?

ETA: Drive DX has 10 day free trial, thanks for telling me about it:
http://binaryfruit.com/drivedx
 
Ah, now I see. Going to try and clone this asap.
 

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jimtron said:
Thanks for the reply. If I'm not able to clone the drive, I was wondering if the problem could be with the PC card (or what do you call the green board on the back)? I have another Seagate 3TB drive, but not the exact same model...wondering 1) could that possibly solve the problem, and 2) are those pretty easy to swap out? and 3) if that's something that might work, do the drives have to be the exact same model?

ETA: Drive DX has 10 day free trial, thanks for telling me about it:
http://binaryfruit.com/drivedx
Click to expand...

Not sure I quite understand these questions, but in view of the Drive DX findings maybe I don't need to.
 
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