External Hard Drive Mess

[voellig]

Hello all,

I was hoping that someone on this forum could help me figure out how to fix the mess I've gotten myself into.

I have an external hard drive, a LaCie Rugged Mini 1TB, that I use for Time Machine backups and storing my music collection. The other day it stopped mounting, so I went to Disk Utilities and tried to fix it. No luck. So I dusted off my copy of DiskWarrior. No luck again- I got an error message saying it couldn't be fixed due to lack of memory (error 2154, I believe). A bit of Googling says that it was because of the Time Machine backups, so I attempted to delete them by dragging them into the Trash and then erasing. Everything that's important to me is backed up on either a different external drive, Dropbox, or Google Drive, and I figured I could just create new backups once the external hard drive is restored. Too late, I realized that was a bad thing to do, as I got into negative numbers of files to delete before just canceling the deletion. Now I'm trying to copy the files back onto the hard drive, to delete them properly through Time Machine, and it's taking forever.

I've got all my music/iTunes files on a backup external hard drive next to me, so I can restore them, and as I said, I don't care about the backups right now. Would erasing the drive entirely fix the problem with the drive mounting? (I'm assuming I could do that through DiskUtility, although I'm not sure about that either at this point.) Or that I could at least use DiskWarrior on it? I don't want to screw up any more than I already have, but I would like to be able to use the drive again soon!

I'm using a 2010 15-inch MacBook Pro, OSX 10.8.3.

Thanks for any and all advice.

Abby

 

[benwiggy]

A backup is a duplicate copy. If you lose one of the copies, then you still have the other.

If you still have your source material: start a new TM backup and carry on. You can erase the old drive.

My advice is not to get a TM disk get too full.

 

[voellig]

Hi benwiggy,

Thanks for the response! My question, though, was about whether erasing my hard drive entirely would fix its problems with mounting, or whether I'd need to run DiskWarrior on it. Or if there's another reason why DiskWarrior wouldn't fix the hard drive in the first place. I would be okay with erasing- everything I have is backed up in other places, but considering I've made such a hash of things already I wasn't sure whether it was a good idea or not.

 

[LaCieTech]

Hi benwiggy,

Thanks for the response! My question, though, was about whether erasing my hard drive entirely would fix its problems with mounting, or whether I'd need to run DiskWarrior on it. Or if there's another reason why DiskWarrior wouldn't fix the hard drive in the first place. I would be okay with erasing- everything I have is backed up in other places, but considering I've made such a hash of things already I wasn't sure whether it was a good idea or not.

Hi,

It sounds to me that the drive may have become a little corrupted during this, there is no reason to use Disk Warrior on the drive if you just plan to erase it anyway. Disk Warrior would be an attempt to fix it to regain the data but since you have other backups...

I recommend re-partitioning the disk in Disk Utility. Don't use the Erase Tab tho, use the Partition tab. Switch the scheme from current to 2 and then back to 1 (or whatever your preference). This will reset the volume table and completely erase the disk. It should mount up just fine after that with 100% available space.

Let us know if you need more help or have other questions. We're at www.lacie.com/mystuff or 503-844-4500 (USA)

~mn, LaCie