Need help with image back up on external drives!!!!

[alwaysautumn]

So here's what I'm working with-on depending on how friendly the drives choose to be.

I'm working on a MBP 120GB HD, 2G of RAM, really nice video card, one 300GB Maxtor external HD(less then one year old) and one 1TB LaCie external HD(brand new).

At work I had both HD plug into our airport extreme (the newest one) so that everyone in the office could share files, store files, etc. I need to transfer all of the 300GB on the maxtor to the lacie to make room for one of our video guys. He needs the maxtor exclusively for capturing. Transferring over the network would take weeks that I don't have. So I decided to use firewire 800 and 400 from my computer to the HD for faster transfer. I plugged in the HD (not daisy chained but separately) and realized that neither drive was showing up as a mounted volume but they were both showing up in the disk utility however they were still not showing up as a mounted volume.

I spoke with a mac genius who also couldn't mount the volumes to another computer and the only way that either of us could access the info on the drives was over the airport extreme network. His advice to me for transferring the data was this:

Backup what little bit I had on the lacie on my MBP HD and then partition or reformat the lacie. Then I should see the lacie pop up on my desktop as a mounted volume.

-That worked.

Then I was told to open up the disk utility and create a new image of the 300GB from the maxtor and direct the image to be stored on the lacie. Once the image was completed on the lacie I could restore the image on the lacie and wouldn't have to transfer anything and then I could reformat the Maxtor for my video guy.

-That did not work.

I let the maxtor and MBP handle the new image file for about 4 hours. When it was done I read a message that said that it could not be completed because of an "input/output error".

What? Why is this not working? I just really want to figure this out for a million reasons but mostly because I'm tired of late nights and no new answers. Thank you in advance for any help that you may be able to offer. Take care.

-bones

 

[banjomamo]

was the maxtor formatted hfs+?

 

[alwaysautumn]

prior to connecting the maxtor to the airport extreme i could just plug the maxtor into my MBP and transfer or edit data either on the maxtor or to another HD whether external or internal with no problems at all. i hope that helps.

 

[banjomamo]

wow thats weird. i wish i knew more. good luck with finding the solution.

one thought - have you hooked the maxtor up to a pc of linux box and tried moving it that way?

 

[alwaysautumn]

no luck with that either. right now i'm trying the create new image process again but i am definitely open to ANY suggestions that may help. thank you all.

 

[alwaysautumn]

can anyone help?

 

[MattJessop]

I'm wondering if the hard drives/partitions are hidden :/

Not sure how it could have happened, but it did happen to me once (Windows decided for fun to hide my personal partition, making it seem like it had just dissappeared. Needless to say i was near having a heart attack)

I'm not sure of how to check this on a Mac. Disk Utility might help.

With Windows you could possibly use Partition Magic to unhide the partition.

As I've said, I have NO idea if this is your problem, but it could possibly be it, and it fits it perfectly.

But hard drives are a funny thing, and are very complicated beasts.

 

[banjomamo]

what if you plug the maxtor back into the airport and then connect a computer to the airport via its lan port. at least then you could transfer the files at 100Mbs.

just a thought

 

[alwaysautumn]

the only problem with that is that i need to transfer 300gb and sometimes the network gets interrupted and completely kills the transfer. besides, 300gb is a lot to transfer over the airport. that would take too long. i need to figure out what's going on so that i don't have this problem in the future. thanks for your advice.

 

[banjomamo]

your wired network gets interrupted? im not talking about over the wifi.

im suggesting hooking the drive up to the airport as you did before. but instead of connecting over wifi connect to its LAN port. it couldnt take more than a weekend to copy over 300gb over a wired LAN connection.

 

[MikeTheC]

Couple thoughts.

First off, with the Maxtor HDD connected to your MacBook Pro, get some kind of 3rd party HDD utility app (DiskWarrior? TechTool Pro? etc.) and have it check the HDD out. See if there's something it can fix on it's own and restore the mountability of the drive on your Mac.

Second, open up terminal window (HDD > Applications > Utilities > Terminal) and type "cd /Volumes [Enter]" followed by "ls [Enter]" and see what shows up. If the volume label of the HDD in question appears, then type "cd /Volumes/xxx[tab]" where "xxx" corresponds to the first few unique characters of the name of the drive, and [tab] will autocomplete the name, escaping space characters and all that other fun stuff. Then, press Enter.

At that point, do you get an error? If not, then try typing in "ls [Enter]" again, and see what happens.

On a fully normally functioning drive, you should see whatever is at the root of the drive (that is, the top-most level of the file system heirarchy). If you are seeing the data files you know should be there, then the next step is to try and open a Finder window to the drive.

The best way (probably) would be to type "cd .. [Enter]" followed by "open xxx[tab] [Enter]"

If the window opens, then what you do is drag copy your data as rapidly as you can to the LaCie, then nuke the Maxtor. This just eliminates having to worry about corrupted file systems or data structures or any other stupid thing which might be the source of the problem.

If none of this works, then... well, you're stuck having to copy "by any means necessary".