It's too bad that my first post here is a plea, but here goes.
Today I am the proud owner of an endlessly-clicking external Firewire disk with partitions that sometimes mount (yet contain nothing). This, if anything, should be a lesson in what one should NOT do. Curiousity and impatience are a very bad mix.
Around a month ago I was thinking of installing Tiger and was "readying" my HD space for it. I wanted to keep my "old" system (as I couldn't take a break from work long enough to install an entire new "work" system), so I made a clone of it (using CarbonCopyCloner) to my external HD. Worked like a charm; I could boot from my external HD and continue work without a hitch. A couple days later I erased my "original" workstation partition and installed Tiger.
To do the above I had to go out and buy tons of DVD's and CD's as I had not room enough on the external HD to clone my "work" system to it - two days of burning 'on the side'. While I was doing that I had come to a point where I had enough space across two partions for my system - would it be possible to, if I moved all the data to one partition, change the overall size of the second without destroying the data? I had a look around for an app that did this and discovered three - iPartition seemed to be the best of these. I downloaded the demo and played with it a bit - it seemed pretty convincing. I wrote them with a couple questions and they answered after around a day - very friendly people. I unfortunately had moved on by then but told them I liked their application and would think of buying it.
Now here's the fun bit - it was only a couple days ago that I had time to "move out" of my work system into Tiger - I was "getting rid" of the applications that I would re-install into Tiger (I did a clean install), so the entire thing took up less than half its partition space. The partition next door was where I kept all my CD's - I saw iPartition as an opportunity to "move the barrier" between the two without having to burn all 70gigas of mp3's. But I'm not one to buy something without being sure that it works.
I had told a friend about iPartition and he said he had it and it worked fine - I gave him a call and asked him I could give it a try. All my data was backed up, there was only my music and my "old" system on my Firewire HD, so no problem for data loss.
Well, to make a long story... er, not too too long, iPartition crashed halfway through (1/2 operations?) - to tell you the truth I can't remember if my entire HD disappeared right away (I may have "blanked out"), but in any case, when I restarted, all partitions it contained were gone. My hd made a rather bad sound on startup, then it would click... click... click... click... well, eternally. The same happens every time since then, and sometimes certain partitions won't appear at all (looking in Disk Utility), not even in grey.
The problem seems mechanical, but I can't see how software could do this. I spent a good two nights reading up on everything from firewire to firmware - I even opened up my HD to see what make and model its bridge (Yano - OxfordFW911) and HD (Western Electric) were - and even downloaded a java Firmware updater to check (I repeat, check) whether the firmware was installed and recognizable. It seems to be.
So how can I get the drive to turn normally - can I? Is it definitively dead? I really don't think any software I used had anything to do with it - before doing anything I had run Diskwarrior, Norton Speed disk (defragment for disk resizing) and repair permissions, and something made iPartition crash - a bad block perhaps? I had a look at my crash logs but understood little there - as far as I'm concerned, that little game is over. I would like to write to the iPartition people but I had this done for me with software that wasn't mine - Should I buy the application then ask them for help - buy the application that may have been part of the problem in the first place? Something tells me that, even if I did that, my drive would still be irrepairable. If they can fix it I will for sure - but this would make one &$%^ of a paradox situation.
I would like to recuperate my HD if possible, so if any of you would have any suggestions please forward them to me here - thanks in advance for that. I think I have taken up a little too much room in telling the story and not enough on the info - I have some other info (crash logs, message on Single-user startup when drive tries to mount) but I will only post it here if needed.
Conclusion: DVD media has become very appealing over these past few days. "Switching things around" on an HD is NOT to be taken lightly with ANY application.
Today I am the proud owner of an endlessly-clicking external Firewire disk with partitions that sometimes mount (yet contain nothing). This, if anything, should be a lesson in what one should NOT do. Curiousity and impatience are a very bad mix.
Around a month ago I was thinking of installing Tiger and was "readying" my HD space for it. I wanted to keep my "old" system (as I couldn't take a break from work long enough to install an entire new "work" system), so I made a clone of it (using CarbonCopyCloner) to my external HD. Worked like a charm; I could boot from my external HD and continue work without a hitch. A couple days later I erased my "original" workstation partition and installed Tiger.
To do the above I had to go out and buy tons of DVD's and CD's as I had not room enough on the external HD to clone my "work" system to it - two days of burning 'on the side'. While I was doing that I had come to a point where I had enough space across two partions for my system - would it be possible to, if I moved all the data to one partition, change the overall size of the second without destroying the data? I had a look around for an app that did this and discovered three - iPartition seemed to be the best of these. I downloaded the demo and played with it a bit - it seemed pretty convincing. I wrote them with a couple questions and they answered after around a day - very friendly people. I unfortunately had moved on by then but told them I liked their application and would think of buying it.
Now here's the fun bit - it was only a couple days ago that I had time to "move out" of my work system into Tiger - I was "getting rid" of the applications that I would re-install into Tiger (I did a clean install), so the entire thing took up less than half its partition space. The partition next door was where I kept all my CD's - I saw iPartition as an opportunity to "move the barrier" between the two without having to burn all 70gigas of mp3's. But I'm not one to buy something without being sure that it works.
I had told a friend about iPartition and he said he had it and it worked fine - I gave him a call and asked him I could give it a try. All my data was backed up, there was only my music and my "old" system on my Firewire HD, so no problem for data loss.
Well, to make a long story... er, not too too long, iPartition crashed halfway through (1/2 operations?) - to tell you the truth I can't remember if my entire HD disappeared right away (I may have "blanked out"), but in any case, when I restarted, all partitions it contained were gone. My hd made a rather bad sound on startup, then it would click... click... click... click... well, eternally. The same happens every time since then, and sometimes certain partitions won't appear at all (looking in Disk Utility), not even in grey.
The problem seems mechanical, but I can't see how software could do this. I spent a good two nights reading up on everything from firewire to firmware - I even opened up my HD to see what make and model its bridge (Yano - OxfordFW911) and HD (Western Electric) were - and even downloaded a java Firmware updater to check (I repeat, check) whether the firmware was installed and recognizable. It seems to be.
So how can I get the drive to turn normally - can I? Is it definitively dead? I really don't think any software I used had anything to do with it - before doing anything I had run Diskwarrior, Norton Speed disk (defragment for disk resizing) and repair permissions, and something made iPartition crash - a bad block perhaps? I had a look at my crash logs but understood little there - as far as I'm concerned, that little game is over. I would like to write to the iPartition people but I had this done for me with software that wasn't mine - Should I buy the application then ask them for help - buy the application that may have been part of the problem in the first place? Something tells me that, even if I did that, my drive would still be irrepairable. If they can fix it I will for sure - but this would make one &$%^ of a paradox situation.
I would like to recuperate my HD if possible, so if any of you would have any suggestions please forward them to me here - thanks in advance for that. I think I have taken up a little too much room in telling the story and not enough on the info - I have some other info (crash logs, message on Single-user startup when drive tries to mount) but I will only post it here if needed.
Conclusion: DVD media has become very appealing over these past few days. "Switching things around" on an HD is NOT to be taken lightly with ANY application.
