Screen Sharing and a Now-Unreadable Drive

[Hrothgar]

I'm not sure where to post this, but this seems like a good place.

I have a seven month old WD MY Book 3 tb external drive. When I got it, I created three partitions -- 1) Time Machine backup of my Macbook Pro; 2) Carbon Copy Cloner back up of my Mac Mini* and 3) a partition to store misc files.

The drive has worked fine for months.

Last night, I connected the WD Drive to the Mac Mini, which I was controlling through Screen Sharing on my MBP. I started the CCC backup. Then, I closed the top of the MBP and went to sleep. When I woke up, I had an error message on the Mac Mini that the CCC backup failed because the destination drive could not have been found. And I had a message telling me that I need to eject drives properly.

I hadn't ejected the drive, however. Unless shutting the top on the MBP, which was screen sharing with the Mac Mini, somehow acted to force eject the external drive? That wouldn't make much sense to me. Do drives every spontaneously eject?

Bigger problem is that the Mac Mini partition on the WD Drive is now unreadable. I don't know what happened, but neither my Mac Mini or MBP can read or write to that partition. The other two partitions on the drive are fine. I tried using Disk Utility and it can't fix the partition or erase it.

Is it possible that improperly ejecting a drive can ruin it? I know we're always told to click the eject buton first, but don't people yank out usb drive all the time without ejecting?

And, is there any way to get that 1tb of space back?

*I don't know why I'm doing CCC instead of Time Machine.

 

[JohnDS]

Disk Warrior by Alsoft might be able to fix it: http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/

 

[Fishrrman]

"Is it possible that improperly ejecting a drive can ruin it? I know we're always told to click the eject buton first, but don't people yank out usb drive all the time without ejecting?"

Yes, it IS possible to mess up drive directories by doing that.
The drive may not be "ruined" (in the sense that the hardware has been broken), but it seems that USB drives are quite sensitive to this, and it's all-too-easy to mess up a directory by an "improper ejection".

Whether this describes YOUR problem, can't say without close examination of the drive.

As JohnDS suggests, DiskWarrior -might- help, but no promises there either.

Hmmm... was the "Mac Mini partition" only a CCC backup?
If that's the case, I'd just re-initialize that partition, and then have CCC "start from scratch" and recreate the entire backup. No big thing, since a CCC backup is just a clone of the original drive.

Suggestion that might help:

NEXT time, don't "close the cover" on the MBP after starting the backup.

Just set up a screen saver, and turn that on.
Leave the cover open.

Also, check your energy saver prefs and UNcheck "put drives to sleep when possible" (if you haven't already done that).

One other thing:
Perhaps it's just me, but if I was going to do a CCC backup of the Mini, I'd connect the backup drive DIRECTLY to the Mini, and do it that way.
But again, that's just me.

 

[JohnDS]

Am I correct in assuming that you were connecting to the Mini using screensharing, because you are using it as a headless server?

In any case, your alternative to something like Disk Warrior, is to back up the two other partitions to another drive, then reformat and re-parition the problematic drive and copy everything back.

 

[Hrothgar]

Fisherman -- I tried using disk utility to erase and reformat the CCC partition -- is that what you mean by re-initialize?

 

[JohnDS]

That is what Fisherman meant, and he must of missed your comment in your first post that you were unable to do so. Im that case, unless Disk Warrior can fix it, your only choice it to erase and repartition the entire drive.

 

[Hrothgar]

Thanks everyone.
This is my second Western Digital external drive to fritz out within a year of acquisition. (This one I got when i returned my last one under warranty.) Is it time to switch to another brand?

Oddly enough, I've never had a problem with the drives in my computers. My back-up drives are the ones that keep failing.

 

[JohnDS]

Are you being carefully to eject the external volumes before you disconnect the drives?
[doublepost=1464029114][/doublepost]

Thanks everyone.
This is my second Western Digital external drive to fritz out within a year of acquisition. (This one I got when i returned my last one under warranty.) Is it time to switch to another brand?

Oddly enough, I've never had a problem with the drives in my computers. My back-up drives are the ones that keep failing.