I've killed 4 hard drives recently, 3 LaCie USB Porsche 500 GBs and an Iomega 1TB Ultramax. In all cases this is the scenario: ripping movie DVD using mactheripper. Program crashes. Have to push and hold down the button on back of the Mac Mini to shut down computer. Upon restart, whatever drive MactheRipper was writing to makes clicking noises and fails to mount. Further the drive does not appear in Disc Utility. Is there anyway to rescue these drives? Will Disc Warrior help? It seems silly that a drive would be so easy to kill. Thanks in advance for any advise.
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Clicking, unmounting Hard Drives
- Thread starter deelirious
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Wow that has got to be some kind of non-enviable record! 
First off, drives that do not appear in Disk Utility are usually not recognized in Disk Warrior either, sorry to say. While Disk Warrior is a great tool that I count on for working on client systems (and my own) I really wouldn't count on it to help out in this situation but there are exceptions to anytning.
What I can suggest to try is the "initialize" part of Prosoft's Data Rescue II as that unexpectedly allowed me to at least get a working drive from one that was unrecognizable otherwise recently. Unfortunately the demo of the program has that module disabled, as well as their "Repair" module (and all other parts of modules that would actually write to the disk). It still might be worth downloading the demo as it does allow "Verify" since that is a read only process and it would be worth it to see if Data Rescue could "see" the drives in question. If it can see them, then it should to be able to repair them or at very least re-initialize them to make them usable again.
That does seem bizarre that a force quit managed to kill all those drives though- I think in the past 10 years of working on Macs I have managed to kill a total of one that way, so something just does not fit. Your experience is not the typical experience with forced restart!
Since your failures all have writing to disk in common when you had to force restart (the #1 worst way to almost insure at least directory damage) I have a question about your version of Mac the Ripper. Are you using the old freeware version (Version 2.6.6) or have you signed up for and installed the gift-supported current version (3.0r14m)? The freeware version has not been updated for probably three years or more now and is now totally unsupported, so I would have some concerns about that. I can only say that I have never had a crash with the current one while using it up to the current 10.5.5 OS.
First off, drives that do not appear in Disk Utility are usually not recognized in Disk Warrior either, sorry to say. While Disk Warrior is a great tool that I count on for working on client systems (and my own) I really wouldn't count on it to help out in this situation but there are exceptions to anytning.
What I can suggest to try is the "initialize" part of Prosoft's Data Rescue II as that unexpectedly allowed me to at least get a working drive from one that was unrecognizable otherwise recently. Unfortunately the demo of the program has that module disabled, as well as their "Repair" module (and all other parts of modules that would actually write to the disk). It still might be worth downloading the demo as it does allow "Verify" since that is a read only process and it would be worth it to see if Data Rescue could "see" the drives in question. If it can see them, then it should to be able to repair them or at very least re-initialize them to make them usable again.
That does seem bizarre that a force quit managed to kill all those drives though- I think in the past 10 years of working on Macs I have managed to kill a total of one that way, so something just does not fit. Your experience is not the typical experience with forced restart!
Since your failures all have writing to disk in common when you had to force restart (the #1 worst way to almost insure at least directory damage) I have a question about your version of Mac the Ripper. Are you using the old freeware version (Version 2.6.6) or have you signed up for and installed the gift-supported current version (3.0r14m)? The freeware version has not been updated for probably three years or more now and is now totally unsupported, so I would have some concerns about that. I can only say that I have never had a crash with the current one while using it up to the current 10.5.5 OS.
As they say great minds think alike! I asked the same question.
bahaha yes so true. we must be good at troubleshooting!! either that or we have both had our fair share of problems with MTR
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Hey guys, thanks so much for your help. Yes, I'm using the old version of MTR: 2.6.6. Obviously I need to get the new version.
What I just realized, which is bizarre is that the latest drive I've killed, the Iomega Ultramax 1 TB, I had set up as 2 500 GB discs that mounted separately. I was only writing to one of the drives when I had to restart. Yet neither drive is recognized now.
thx again! I really appreciate it. Moving forward, I think I will obviously upgrade to MTR 3, and write to a flash drive, then copy over to my hard drives.
Hey guys, thanks so much for your help. Yes, I'm using the old version of MTR: 2.6.6. Obviously I need to get the new version.
What I just realized, which is bizarre is that the latest drive I've killed, the Iomega Ultramax 1 TB, I had set up as 2 500 GB discs that mounted separately. I was only writing to one of the drives when I had to restart. Yet neither drive is recognized now.
thx again! I really appreciate it. Moving forward, I think I will obviously upgrade to MTR 3, and write to a flash drive, then copy over to my hard drives.
with the type of error that your getting it doesn't matter about the partitions, it seems to be directly completely stuffing up the hard drive.. i have no idea how....just does haha
They're not partitions. They are 2 physically separate drives in one enclosure that mount as two separate drives. They must share a common bus though. I wonder if removing them from the iomega enclosure and putting them in another enclosure might help.....
WWWHHHAAATTTT
that is insane?!?!?!
i have never heard of such a thing. DEFINETLY change the drives to new enclosures, i dont see how the same bus could impact on the drives though, software cannot do damage to hardware...
thats so odd, i really cannot off a solution.
Its definitely weird. And like I said this is the 4th drive in about 5 months I've killed doing the exact same thing. MTR 2.6.6 freezes, the system freezes. I have to force shutdown holding down the power button on back of mac mini, and then the drive is all screwed up and won't mount. Its getting really annoying. The people at the ripdifferent.com forum all say MTR is not to blame, and they're probably right, but its definitely the root cause of the problem by freezing the system down.