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Western Digital My Book = Corrupt?
Posted at February 4, 2008 10:28 am | In Research | By Ben Woodruff
Tags: Annoyances, Apple/Mac, Backup, Data Recovery, Hard Drive, Research, Technology
Last Saturday I wanted to take my My Book external hard drive (400GB) to work, to share some files with a co-worker. It was plugged into my AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBSn non-gig version) via the USB port. I normally have that and a printer plugged into a hub which then plugs into the base station.
So Saturday I did what I thought I was supposed to do in order to unplug the drive: hit eject on my machine, and then just to make sure, logged in using the AirPort Utility and clicked “Disconnect All Users” on the drive. So I unplugged it and drove it to Avon.
When I get there my co-worker plugs it in: it doesn’t mount. I didn’t think anything of it. He is running OS X on non-Mac hardware (hackintosh). I figured it was just his machine. So I plug it into my MacBook Pro: still doesn’t mount.
So now I’m getting worried. I had a backup but it was about a week old. I really didn’t want to have to restore back to that. I took the drive apart (Thanks Scott Cramer), and hooked it up to another machine so that I could run SpinRite on it. 30 some hours later SpinRite finishes and says there is nothing wrong with the drive. Hmm…
My next step is to boot from the Leopard DVD and re-attach the My Book to my MBP using a SATA -> USB adaptor that I borrowed from my co-worker (Thanks Jeremiah). The reason for using the adaptor is I wanted to rule out the USB connection on the drive as a problem. Apparently that wasn’t the problem. The drive still wasn’t working correctly. I opened up Disk Utility from the Leopard DVD, and did a ‘verify’ on the drive: great, it tells me it needs to be repaired. It says that there is an incorrect number of Access Lists (?) and that it needs minor repair.
So I was hopeful: minor repair, that doesn’t sound so bad, does it? I start up the repair, and let it run over night. Wake up today, and it’s still trying to repair. It doesn’t give any details about what it’s doing. Now I’m just frustrated. I figure a format will fix it, so I went ahead and did that.
That appears to have worked, but of course now I’m out a week’s worth of data. Really frustrating experience. I don’t know if it’s Apple’s fault (the AirPort), my fault for not ejecting it properly (though I did everything I’ve ever been told I should do) or Western Digital’s fault (the My Book) but either way…
I think I’m going to buy a 1TB Time Capsule so I can do more frequent backups.
Also - I wish SuperDuper! would finally release a Leopard compatible version… that would make my life much easier.
P.S. Pretty much all I lost was media that I have physical copies of, so I’m not totally SOL. I wouldn’t store anything really important on there knowing that it doesn’t get backed up frequently.
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I blame apple for it ^_^
Comment by Jordan — February 4, 2008 @ 1:14 pm