I'm not a Mac newbie but I need some help or at least a small explaination.

[iMikeT]

Here's the deal....

I was doing work on my computer as normal and was in the middle of a file transfer between my Mac and a partition on one of my external drives. My external drive is separated into four partitions. Towards the end of the transfer, I got a message saying that what I was doing could not be completed and I hit "OK". The next thing I know is that the partition vanished.

So at this point, I tried to eject the rest of the dive by ejecting the other partitions but then got a Kernel panic. I did what I was supposed to at this point.

When I got everything back up, I turned my external drive back on but this time the partition that vanished did not mount. So I ran Disk Utility and it showed that that particular partition had nothing but free space. I already knew that everything was gone at this point so I went ahead and reformatted and will resume work like normal tomorrow. I'm just glad that I routinely back everything up...

So anyway, I just want to know what happened. Could there have been a problem while writing a directory tree and it took everything with it?

By the way, the rest of the drive is unaffected... for now.

 

[skunk]

So anyway, I just want to know what happened. Could there have been a problem while writing a directory tree and it took everything with it?

By the way, the rest of the drive is unaffected... for now.

Having just had a LaCie 300GB drive die on me, one partition at a time, I'd say you should ditch the whole shebang asap.

 

[iMikeT]

Having just had a LaCie 300GB drive die on me, one partition at a time, I'd say you should ditch the whole shebang asap.

I can't just easily do that. I use the hard drive heavily for work.

 

[iMikeT]

Any other takers?

Should I reformat the entire hard drive and just start over? Or can I live with having already formatted the one partition and work as normal like before?

 

[CanadaRAM]

I can't just easily do that. I use the hard drive heavily for work.

What Skunk is saying is, chances are you shortly won't have a choice in the matter... if the drive is progressively losing its integrity, it may completely fail without notice.

Now is the time to buy a new drive and transfer all of your stuff onto it. THEN you can fool around with reformatting and testing the old drive for sector errors. If it looks to be stable, then put the old drive in another external case and use it as a secondary drive.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[iMikeT]

Actually, I just got the drive.

Can having this many partitions (four partitions) be affecting it?

I don't know. Maybe I'll give Western Digital a call and see what they can do. Maybe get me a new drive? I was just surprised to see a kernel panic while this happened. What could that mean?

 

[DannySmurf]

That's strange. I had Vista on my MBP blast one of my external drives almost exactly the same way. One minute it was fine. The next, the partitions were still there but there was nothing in them, and neither Vista nor OSX would mount them.

I'm assuming that something happened to the partition table. That's not necessarily a hardware problem (my drive seems to be working fine now, and it's not that old).

Is this a Firewire or USB drive that you've got?

 

[iMikeT]

It's a combo USB 2.0/FireWire 400 drive. I was using FireWire.

 

[seabass069]

Isn't there a limit of how many partitions one drive can have? I am talking about actual partitions, not extensions.

 

[iMikeT]

Isn't there a limit of how many partitions one drive can have? I am talking about actual partitions, not extensions.

If there is a limit as to how many physical partitions a drive can have, I doubt that 4 is anywhere near that.

 

[iMikeT]

So I called Apple today about the problem and they told me to call the hard drive's manufacturer (Western Digital).

Apple had nothing to say about the kernel panic except to tell me that the hardware may not be compatible.... yahda, yahda, yahda....

I'll be calling Western Digital tomorrow and hopefully have a fix to this mess.

I'm just afraid of connecting my other external drives to my Mac if the end result will be a kernel panic and a complete loss of my data.

 

[iMikeT]

I got off the phone with Western Digital not too long ago. Those guys nearly wanted me to jump through hoops before relenting to send me a new drive.

Actually, they're sending me a new drive for another reason and not for the partition crash. Oh well...