Pessimistic harddrive issues.

[Kingsnapped]

I'm working on a very important project in Final Cut Express, and I borrowed a backup drive to stash my music and stuff so I can use about most of my internal drive on this project. My internal hard drive is having some major issues though.

I try to import in Final cut and get a warning that I am out of disc space. I have to force Final Cut to quit, and go to the finder to discover that I "have" 11megs of HD. I know this is a bloody lie, so I repair permissions and it magically discovers 40 gigs. This has happened twice today, and is really starting to cheese me off. I know there actually are 40-ish free gigs, but when the computer convinces itself that I'm am low.. it acts like it. It took about five minutes for it to open disc utility to repair premissions and remind it that it has all this free space. What is my best course of action to finish this project, then eventually fix it?

 

[Makosuke]

Never heard of an issue like that before, but it sounds like an unpleasant one.

Question: Have you tried booting from the OS install discs and running a check with disk utility there to see if it fixes anything? Perhaps the problem is more severe than it seems.

Better yet, get your hands on a pro disk utility of some sort and try doing a disk check/defragment. Who knows, maybe some fragmentation issue is causing your space woes, though I have never heard of such a thing.

The one other possibility I can think of offhand is that some very, very large temporary file is getting created on disk for some reason, although that doesn't quite fit the symptoms you're describing. Is there a lot of disk grinding while you're working? How much RAM do you have?

 

[Kingsnapped]

My system is a 1.25 g4 with 512megs of ram. I've never had a problem like this before, and I've done a lot of big projects in Final Cut.

When it happened just recently, the harddrive was grinding like.. one little click every few seconds. I've been repairing permissions since I made the first post (and the bar is only a .tiny. way across) and my screensaver and expose are running fine. I guess I'll boot from the OSX disc and try to repair from there (if the current repair doesn't help) but I really want to back my stuff up before I do anything huge.

I have a week to finish this project and it's huge... maybe a Wisconsin member can hook me up with a G5 for a bit...

 

[Kingsnapped]

Aha! There's a corrupt frame giving me trouble... unfortunately, it's in the middle of a great shot. I can't take a screenshot (as I'm posting from the pc) but there is a clip that is about ten seconds long which is 26.72 gigs. That doesn't account for the other 14 gigs.. but it gives us an idea.

Stranger yet, the name of the clip doesn't match other FCE capture scratch. This one is named "Untitled 0006-av-0", while normal (good) clips are "Untitled 000x." OSX can also not read this effed up file.

I guess I'll trash everything ending with "-av-0" and hope to lose only a few minutes of work.

edit: Killed the wierd files, got my space back. Now I have to wonder what is to blame, and do I reformat after I finish this project.

 

[ChrisFromCanada]

I would think it would just be easier to use the external drive for the video considering its faster and then you could just leave your music. But it just hit me that you probably just have one FW 400 port so you probably cant share one FW port with a video camera and the HD so never mind. And just to clarify you have tried a restart, right?

 

[Kingsnapped]

I would think it would just be easier to use the external drive for the video considering its faster and then you could just leave your music. But it just hit me that you probably just have one FW 400 port so you probably cant share one FW port with a video camera and the HD so never mind. And just to clarify you have tried a restart, right?

Yes, I've restarted. As a student, I lack the funds to get an external drive fast enough to work off. As I said, I've never had harddrive problems like this in my 9 months of editing on that machiene. I do have a FW 400 and 800 port, so once I get the ka-ching... and a project I won't want to work on on the road.. I will go external.

 

[Kingsnapped]

Hope I'm not talking to myself...

update: I tried to re-log the clip that caused all the trouble when I tried to log it. It was paused on my camera and I started log and capture. Before the "waiting for timecode" even came up, it told me that I had no disc space, and wouldn't let me escape to exit. I force-quit and went to the finder and found the capture scratch of that clip, worth 27 gigabytes. Hopefully, it's just a problem with that tape. I'm gonna take it to the high school tomorrow to find out.