Hard Drive Woes..

[dvmac]

RE: Internal HD in External Enclosure..

I wonder if anyone can help - my situation is a little different to the previous post but runs along similar lines..

I had a LaCie external drive (FW400, 120GB) this was partititioned into 3, attached to an AGP DP450 G4 running X.3. One partition corrupted then the others, I tried to reinitialise after numerous recovery attempts but the disk was dead.

Subsequently I purchased an internal drive mechanism which was the same manufacturer/spec but in 250GB flavour. I have read that my machine wouldn't see a 'big' drive internally so i put it into the external LaCie enclosure and re-connected it to machine.

Disk Utility attempted to format this per my instructions but hung after one third of the progress bar. Every time I have tried since I get an input/output error or it hangs in the same place! Could the Firewire board be damaged? Is there something I'm missing? Does anyone know of a link/document where I might find comprehensive instructtions for fitting it internally(jumper settings, etc)?

Incidentally, I have also hooked it up to an XServe and tried formatting it on there and it does the same thing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is driving me nuts and I have LOTS of work to catch up on..

 

[zacharydz]

RE: Internal HD in External Enclosure..

I wonder if anyone can help - my situation is a little different to the previous post but runs along similar lines..

I had a LaCie external drive (FW400, 120GB) this was partititioned into 3, attached to an AGP DP450 G4 running X.3. One partition corrupted then the others, I tried to reinitialise after numerous recovery attempts but the disk was dead.

Subsequently I purchased an internal drive mechanism which was the same manufacturer/spec but in 250GB flavour. I have read that my machine wouldn't see a 'big' drive internally so i put it into the external LaCie enclosure and re-connected it to machine.

Disk Utility attempted to format this per my instructions but hung after one third of the progress bar. Every time I have tried since I get an input/output error or it hangs in the same place! Could the Firewire board be damaged? Is there something I'm missing? Does anyone know of a link/document where I might find comprehensive instructtions for fitting it internally(jumper settings, etc)?

Incidentally, I have also hooked it up to an XServe and tried formatting it on there and it does the same thing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is driving me nuts and I have LOTS of work to catch up on..

If I had to guess, I would think that the problem if due to your firewire enclosure. Not all firewire/IDE bridges have chipsets that support large hard drives (137GB+). Since your enclosure originally only had a 120 GB hard drive in it, you wouldnt have known if it didnt support large hard drives. Thus, when you put the 250 GB hard drive in it, it won't be able to write or access beyond 137GB, and is probably why you are encountering the problem at the same spot each time. I would recommend getting a new firewire enclosure for the drive that supports large hard drives. In the mean time, if you want to use the hard drive, just format it to one partition that is less than 137 GB. You would be essentially wasting half the drive, but it would function fine.