Osx Erased My G-drive Mini - Wth????

[nicoboss]

I bought a new external portable Hard Drive to replace my failing 80Gb Firelite.
Following the advise of an Apple "genius", i grabbed a G-Drive mini 160Gb - nice looking, if a little bulkier than the firelite, the cooling system was impressive enough to persuade me that this was THE ideal portable data solution. So I transfered my valuable data onto it on Saturday, formating the drive in OS 10.5, I worked on it a little bit on Sunday, prepared some files to use at the office today.

An hour ago, when I plugged the drive into my office computer (using 10.4, BTW), to grab those files and send them to my client, I realized with horror that the damn thing had emptied itself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I really don't understand and never seen that before - failing hard drives are common and I've had my share, but never seen anything wiping itself out like that - even the name of the hard drive was restored from whatever i had called it to the factory default "G-Drive mini" and went back to 146Gb or so available (I had copied over 75Gb of data on saturday.


DO ANYONE KNOW WHAT IS HAPPENING ??? - Would it be an incompatibility from 10.5 to 10.4? - After formating the drive, I customized the icon of the drive to one that was supplied in the install CD, thru Copy/Paste in the "Information" window...would it be the reaon ? it still worked fine afterward..


I am tempted to return the thing and grab one of those LaCie one I was going to get before being advised by a Genius to "go for the G-Drive if want(ed) reliability (I actually got quite the opposite).


ANY Advice would be greatly appreciated.

THANKS!

 

[xUKHCx]

Have you tried putting it back on a Leopard machine.

 

[motulist]

Well, I'm sure this isn't what you want to hear, but to me it sounds like user error is the most likely cause of the problem. I could be wrong though. There's not much info here for us to go on. Maybe it's a problem w 10.5 set to auto-reformat any unrecognized drives?

 

[nicoboss]

Yes. User error is the first thing that came into my mind because it seems impossible that it does that by itself without mechanical warnings or things like that .....
But at the same time, to my knowledge, it is pretty difficult to erase a hard drive and restoring it to factory default without doing it intentionally through, say, Disk Utility.

Or maybe there are other tricks you can do directly from the desktop to do just that and that I activated by mistake.... I don;t know - but it is in my view unacceptable to have such a thing happen to a professional tool ....

 

[Roy Hobbs]

Did OS X use the new drive for Time Machine?? Then reformat it to suit Time Machines needs??

 

[xUKHCx]

Did OS X use the new drive for Time Machine?? Then reformat it to suit Time Machines needs??

It doesn't do this without asking. And if it did there would be a backups.bd (or whatever it is called) folder on the drive.

 

[nicoboss]

yes - no Time Machine –

I will check it tonight on 10.5, see how it behaves, but it would be frustrating if 10.5 saw the content of the drive, and not 10.4 - wouldn't make too much sense.....