I was working on some music projects in the afternoon (on the FW drive - Western Digital ) and I ejected the drive, turned it off and went off to sleep. I turn onm my powerbook, and the drive..and there's a message that says the usual driv enot recognised..eject, initialise or ignore! I freaked out and turned it off, turned it on again but it was true! Everything was gone! I did backup the drive recently but imagine if this were in the middle of a session or a project. My question is, how the heck did this happen?? The drive was in one place, I didn't slam it around or anything..I admit I have turned it off without 'ejecting' it from the powerbook 2-3 times..could that be the reason? Pretty scary stuff!
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My FW Drive got WIPED!!
- Thread starter Music_Producer
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sometimes you need to wait abit after you eject before turning it off. Yeah, that's exactly what can happen, you drive can get wiped. Possibly the file tree or whatever gets damaged thus resulting in no files found on the drive. Data recovery places can recover these pretty easily methinks - though you have a backup so yay.
Not waiting until the drive starts to spin itself down after a software eject is likely a very bad thing--that delay is where the direcotry contents are probably being synchronized. Having journaling on may help with recovery, but in any case it's liable to cause almost as many problems as just yanking/turning off the drive without ejecting it at all.
Try some disk utilities on it--TechTool, DiskWarrior, heck, maybe even the reviled Norton. If the format/directory isn't too badly screwed up, they may be able to fix it, at least to the point you can get the data since the last backup off.
Note: it's also possible that this is a symptom of a failing hard drive; if you do recover it but get errors while trying to copy files off of it, be wary. If you can reformat it properly, I'd try copying a bunch of files to it and back off, to make sure it's working properly mechanically.
Try some disk utilities on it--TechTool, DiskWarrior, heck, maybe even the reviled Norton. If the format/directory isn't too badly screwed up, they may be able to fix it, at least to the point you can get the data since the last backup off.
Note: it's also possible that this is a symptom of a failing hard drive; if you do recover it but get errors while trying to copy files off of it, be wary. If you can reformat it properly, I'd try copying a bunch of files to it and back off, to make sure it's working properly mechanically.
Sometimes when I'm in a hurry to catch the bus, I unplug the iPod before I eject it and my music gets erased. No more music on the bus for me! 
