My Hard Drive Just Went Blank


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So I came home tonight and went to access my external hard drive which is a Western Digital Mybook 500GB drive and it was blank as if it was formatted to be blank.

I have it set up as a split partition drive basically in the following configuration:

Storage - 250gb

Time Machine 250gb.

The Storage partition is where I had my music, purchased software, keys etc stored as well as personal files. When I looked at the Storage partition, it was empty, but the Time Machine was running perfectly fine and had all my Primary hard drive data from my Internal hard drive.

I am in the process of attempting to recover my files now and probably have about 8 hours left of the scan for files. So far, it has been finding files no problem and I would imagine they are recoverable so I am not too concerned, however..I am trying to figure out what caused this.

The program I am using (Data Rescue 3) is telling me the following info which I am believing it to be a hardware issue perhaps?

Slow read near block 4303360.

Slow read near block 14275072.

Slow read near block 25673728.

There are a lot more of those, but only paste these to give you an idea.

I tried looking in my console log and didn't find anything odd there. Except..

12/27/09 12:01:03 PM fseventsd[50] read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005cf94045 (fd -1, errno 2 ; is_reg 1; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)

12/27/09 12:01:03 PM fseventsd[50] read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005cf94045 (fd -1, errno 2 ; is_reg 1; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)

12/27/09 12:01:03 PM fseventsd[50] read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005cfa20a0 (fd -1, errno 2 ; is_reg 1; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)

12/27/09 12:01:03 PM fseventsd[50] read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005cfa20a0 (fd -1, errno 2 ; is_reg 1; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)

12/27/09 12:01:03 PM fseventsd[50] read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005cfa9bf4 (fd -1, errno 2 ; is_reg 1; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)

12/27/09 12:01:03 PM fseventsd[50] read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005cfa9bf4 (fd -1, errno 2 ; is_reg 1; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)

12/27/09 12:01:03 PM fseventsd[50] read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005d0bdf60 (fd -1, errno 2 ; is_reg 1; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)

12/27/09 12:01:03 PM fseventsd[50] read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005d0c8bd0 (fd -1, errno 2 ; is_reg 1; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)

12/27/09 12:01:03 PM fseventsd[50] read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005d0c8bd0 (fd -1, errno 2 ; is_reg 1; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)

12/27/09 12:01:03 PM fseventsd[50] read_disk_log: problems with history file: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005d0d38af (fd -1, errno 2 ; is_reg 1; uid 0/0 gid 0/0)

12/27/09 8:05:46 PM fseventsd[50] disk logger: failed to open output file /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/000000005d135699 (No such file or directory). mount point /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd

12/27/09 8:06:41 PM fseventsd[50] could not open <</Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd/fseventsd-uuid>> (No such file or directory)

12/27/09 8:06:41 PM fseventsd[50] log dir: /Volumes/Storage 2/.fseventsd getting new uuid: 32B63BC2-D8A6-4572-BBD7-103B0A767BA8

12/27/09 8:06:41 PM mds[45] (Normal) DiskStore: Creating index for /Volumes/Storage 2

(I truncated a lot of the duplicate info)

Note: The Storage 2 ...that is not what it was named...It is Storage

Does anyone have any ideas or clues as to what might have caused this?

Could it be caused by Time Machine running on a partition on the same drive somehow?

I am at a total loss on this.

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Damaged groups and incorrect permissions are known to cause data loss in certain circumstances, however I'm not sure if that would affect an external hard drive.

I used to own a WD MyBook 500GB hard drive (blue circle with USB and FW400) and I always had problems with it, including slow seeking and data loss. (N)

Hope you get your all of your files back! :)

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I am getting puzzling messages which are really making me nervous about this....

Today I have been getting the message which tells me that the device has been not ejected properly quite a bit. But it has been my USB drive which is on a different connection. The drive that I am having a problem with is a Firewire drive. So, I figure that wouldn't make a difference, but the USB drive was getting ejected not properly.

The Firewire drive (MyBook), then went disconnected during the scan.... Could this be an issue instead of hardware issue with the Mac? The only thing I have done different with the hardware is actually plugged in a new mouse that I got for Christmas. A Microsoft Mobile Mouse 6000 with a tiny receiver plugged in the keyboard.

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UGH! I let the recovery run overnight, and again the drive disconnected itself. So, I resumed the recovery and the program now crashes at 89.7% on rebuilding the structure of the TOC for the hard drive. It won't proceed any further, so wasted efforts I am afraid on my end.

I have reduced myself to only needing 1 file off of that drive, and the rest I can redownload/restore manually. I just wish that they (programmers) would help a guy out and someone would at least make a freeware alternative or make demos to test with first like the one I was using before we shell out $$$$ to pay for stuff that might not work.

I have tried boomerang and so far that appears to be identical to Data Rescue 3, but not as user friendly in terms of only recovering 1 partition rather than the whole drive which was split.

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This will be my last post on this unless I get some replies as I am basically confused as heck on this one...

I thought it was the Microsoft Mouse which I had plugged in doing the random port disconnects so I removed it and the drive still disconnected itself. For those wondering, when you troubleshoot stuff, and work backward to the last known change, the mouse was it. Nothing against Microsoft. :)

Last night, I went ahead and voided the warranty on the Mybook and pulled it out of the enclosure and put it in a spare one I have which is a generic USB/Sata enclosure. I ran the drive recovery on it which took about 1/8th the time in scanning as opposed to the Mybook enclosure. (Very wierd as USB is supposed to be slower right?). There was ZERO disconnects and the recovery was flawless.

So, I am now in the process of getting the drive reset the way I want it again. However, I am down one drive as I had to borrow an enclosure that I had another drive in which actually is 160gb (perfect for my virtual machines).

I suspect that the mybook enclosure was starting to go bad causing it to disconnect and then the slow block reads I was getting in the data recovery windows. (None showed up on the USB enclosure).

For what it is worth as well, I did do the Apple hardware test, Tech Tools Deluxe test from Apple as well just to ensure my system was not having a hardware issue internally. Those passed just fine.

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I did check the cable as well, it is good as far as I can ascertain. I have thought about plugging the drive back into the Mybook enclosure once more but using a USB cable with it as it has it to see if that might be it. I am not putting any data on the drive though just yet as Mac can be quite a stickler when it comes to improperly ejected drives and I think that is what happened to this one, it didn't eject properly and the system wiped the master table of contents for it.

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I had a 750GB model go completely blank on me just two days ago. It was just a permissions issue though. I had to take ownership of the drive and all its sub-objects. After that it worked like a charm. I would reccommend backing up your data just in case if you have a situation like mine. Just in case it is the hard drive.

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I did, but it didn't make too much sense to me in the terms that something else was trying to access the volume at the same time. Unless, you were pointing me to the fact that I had the Time Machine backing up to my second partition on the same drive.

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I had a 750GB model go completely blank on me just two days ago. It was just a permissions issue though. I had to take ownership of the drive and all its sub-objects. After that it worked like a charm. I would reccommend backing up your data just in case if you have a situation like mine. Just in case it is the hard drive.

I am going to be investing in a 1 year membership to Mozy. I have been increasingly weary of onsite backup for a lot of stuff that I have. I live in an apartment and all it would take would be someone setting their place on fire accident to take my data out. I am trucrypting my data and then sending it online to file storage sites which make it private for now. Just the stuff I can easily re-obtain such as my music that I own or typical downloads such as browsers or stuff like that, I will keep on the drive at home.

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