External HD Problems

[antidrew]

So here's the deal: I'm running a 15" Powerbook G4 1.25 w/OSX 10.4.3
I have a Western Digital 200 GB (FAT32) external drive in an Oxford Semiconductor FW400 case.

A few days ago I accidentally shut off the external drive before unmounting it. When I turned it back on the next day, almost all the media (mp3, avi, mpg, etc) files and some of claim to have Zero data in them. The documents and and some images are perfectly fine but everything else is blank. The files themselves are still there but my mac claims there's nothing inside. Disk Utility says there's nothing wrong with the drive and I tried OnTrack on a PC to recover the data but it's just pulling up blank files. I've checked it with a PC and pulled it out of its enclosure but nothing's working.

Any suggestions?

 

[ezekielrage_99]

I had the same problem about a year ago with my external 120GB Maxtor Drive, I couldn't fix the problem and I ended up loosing a whole heap of files.

I've heard that there are two reasons because of this, one being the hard power on and off can manage to damage the drive and the other one being that the FAT32 filing system is so crappy.

Personally I've gone with the FAT32 filing system is so crappy, since formatting the external drive in a standard UNIX format I have had zero read/write problems and less compatability issues between my Mac OSX, Windows XP, and Linux systems.

This was a pretty costly snafu for me and I strong suggest you try a different filing system, I did and haven't looked back.

 

[adk]

Sorry to hear that, that stuff is probably gone. If you can, I'd recommend reformatting the drive into mac extended. This may cause you less headaches down the road.

 

[JBot]

i had a simular thing happen when i dual booted my windows running desktop with linux. the two systems dont like to read the same partition. It has happened a few times since then, but i have created a backup image on my internal hdrive, so that solves that. I suggest you get on backing things up from now on using rsync.

http://www.labf.org/~egon/mac_backup/

 

[skimaxpower]

er...lame

things to try before you give up hope:
- defrag
- defrag on a windows machine
- scan disk on a windows machine
- change formatting to/from fat32/ntfs using partition magic or similar
- pray and restart about 12 times...