OK, this is really odd, and has ocurred twice now.
The first time this happenend was a few months ago. I hooked up an external firewire drive, and was browsing the folders on the external drive. Suddenly, the folders would show no data in them - get info would read size as 0kb. Then I'd click on other folders - same thing. Soon, whole directories were showing as zero. Finally, absolutely ALL folders disappeared entirely, so I had a blank window when I'd open the drive contents. Here's the odd thing: the drive itself, showed exactly the correct size of capacity and "available" which indicated that the data didn't disappear, just wasn't showing.
I used the Disk Utility app to repair the drive - but it ran it's thing and said no repairs were needed, the HFS+ Journaled was fine. Yet is still was showing no thing - no folders of any kind in the drive.
I disconnected and rebooted the drive. No effect.
I got paranoid and copied the drive to another external drive.
I then rebooted my iBook - and hooked up the external drive. This time, everything was fine! All the data was there, just like before.
That was a few months ago. Suddenly, yesterday, the same thing happened. I hooked up the drive - and you know the story. This time, in addition to the Disk Utility repair, I used DiskWarrior to rebuild the directory in the external drive. No dice.
But something new - I suspected it had nothing to do with the external drive. And in fact, the same thing started happening with the drive on my iBook - I clicked - poof! The entire Documents Folder, simply disappeared!
I looked at the activity monitor: I had plenty of free RAM, no unusual CPU usage (pretty low), plenty of hard drive space.
I rebooted my iBook - everything went back to norm on both the iBook and the external drive. I ran DiskWarrior, I repaired permissions, nothing unusual showed.
Here's the freaky thing. The first time this happened is when I had my original 40GB hard drive in my iBook. The second time it happened (yesterday), I had the new 120GB drive in. So I doubt it's the drive that's failing. Really odd.
One other datapoint. I believe this has something to do with OS X and how long an uptime I've had. Both times this happened, I had uptime in excess of 10 days. I read somewhere that it's actually not a good idea under OS X to go long times without re-boots. Still I have no idea why this happens. Certainly never happend to me under XP. I'm on the machine in my sig except the internal HDD now is 120GB. I have the latest 10.4.8 with all the patches, and I run no haxies.
Did this ever happen to anyone? Any ideas why?
The first time this happenend was a few months ago. I hooked up an external firewire drive, and was browsing the folders on the external drive. Suddenly, the folders would show no data in them - get info would read size as 0kb. Then I'd click on other folders - same thing. Soon, whole directories were showing as zero. Finally, absolutely ALL folders disappeared entirely, so I had a blank window when I'd open the drive contents. Here's the odd thing: the drive itself, showed exactly the correct size of capacity and "available" which indicated that the data didn't disappear, just wasn't showing.
I used the Disk Utility app to repair the drive - but it ran it's thing and said no repairs were needed, the HFS+ Journaled was fine. Yet is still was showing no thing - no folders of any kind in the drive.
I disconnected and rebooted the drive. No effect.
I got paranoid and copied the drive to another external drive.
I then rebooted my iBook - and hooked up the external drive. This time, everything was fine! All the data was there, just like before.
That was a few months ago. Suddenly, yesterday, the same thing happened. I hooked up the drive - and you know the story. This time, in addition to the Disk Utility repair, I used DiskWarrior to rebuild the directory in the external drive. No dice.
But something new - I suspected it had nothing to do with the external drive. And in fact, the same thing started happening with the drive on my iBook - I clicked - poof! The entire Documents Folder, simply disappeared!
I looked at the activity monitor: I had plenty of free RAM, no unusual CPU usage (pretty low), plenty of hard drive space.
I rebooted my iBook - everything went back to norm on both the iBook and the external drive. I ran DiskWarrior, I repaired permissions, nothing unusual showed.
Here's the freaky thing. The first time this happened is when I had my original 40GB hard drive in my iBook. The second time it happened (yesterday), I had the new 120GB drive in. So I doubt it's the drive that's failing. Really odd.
One other datapoint. I believe this has something to do with OS X and how long an uptime I've had. Both times this happened, I had uptime in excess of 10 days. I read somewhere that it's actually not a good idea under OS X to go long times without re-boots. Still I have no idea why this happens. Certainly never happend to me under XP. I'm on the machine in my sig except the internal HDD now is 120GB. I have the latest 10.4.8 with all the patches, and I run no haxies.
Did this ever happen to anyone? Any ideas why?