Once again, I am letting a repair utility, in this case, Disk Warrior, go through it’s time-consuming and completely NOT-promising process.

Here’s what I do know:

• What one utility can’t fix, another sometimes can
• When a repair utility fails the first time, sometimes the second time it will yield different results (sometimes a disk-restore utility will work, but only after several rounds taking hours and hours or even days)
• Sometimes a particular app doesn’t work one way, but when you try it another way (like via target mode), it does.
• There is no sane preference between the different utilities: Drive Genius, Disk Warrior, Etc… It seems to me like at any given moment, one might be better than the other, or that maybe certain programs are better with certain issues.
• Patience is a virtue.
• It’s a good idea to plan, while your repair utility is or isn’t working for hours and hours or days, what you’re going to do next.  Reformat?
• Any sign of progress is a glimpse of hope, even if the program only updates you every two hours.
• There is no hope for a bad drive, or bad ram or a bad logic board or power-supply, which can lead to a false diagnosis of a bad drive.
• It is true that sometimes weird things like putting your drive in the freezer, will allow you to recover your data.
• The language used by utilities is not understandable by humans.
• We need to get used to these kinds of problems.
• We need to be prepared for them (back-up, stupid!)
• Again, I am a fool for not backing up the contents of this little laptop I have, which I thought I didn’t care much about, data-wise…

If I get this little bastard running again, I vow to look into network-backup solutions.  My main computer has a clone, which updates every day.

But a physical drive doesn’t make sense for a little baby dummy computer.  Turns out, that little dummy was one of my best friends and now I’m standing here feeling like a total jerk.

Happy New Year everyone!

After cloning my drive with Carbon Copy Cloner and migrating to the clone, I found that Digital Performer wasn’t able to save files! Error Says:

An Error occurred while writing to the disk. The file [name] was not saved. This file was created in a later version of Digital Performer and cannot be opened in this version. Try to save your file on another disk or folder, or with a different name.

Oh no!

A little digging found me these Instructions from MOTU but they are slightly incorrect, at least they were for me.

The fix is to delete an invisible file called Auth-DigitalPerformer 5.0 from your Hard Drive’s root directory.

If you’re not comfortable doing things in the Terminal, File Buddy is a great app for this sort of thing. It’s like a souped-up Finder allows you to work with invisible files and do all kinds of other advanced things with the stuff on your Mac. It’s a very useful program but it does cost like $40 bucks.

A free Applications that will get the job done just as well is called Visibility and it’s made by a company called Zevrix Solutions. Download it, install it, launch it, click on Show Invisible Files, the Finder will relaunch, then you will see the file called Auth-DigitalPerformer 5.0 in your Root directory. Trash it and DP should be happy again. Afterward you can use Visibility to put the Finder back to normal.

Do be really careful not to move or delete any of the other invisible files. They’re hidden from you for a reason.

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Looks like it’s only USB 2, and I suspect it would be better for me if it was FireWire 800 but… What do I know… Still looks pretty sweet.

[end of EDIT]

I found the following HERE I have no reason to doubt that this absolute stranger, calling himself erico, who wrote what is below, is telling the truth in this forum I found.

The Click Of Death is actually the Whack Of Death.

There are two motors in a hard drive. The first is obvious — it’s the spindle motor that spins the platters. In the very old days, these were awesome 1800 or 2400 rpm self-sync DC motors. These were cool toys. Later ones were 3600 rpm DC motors, with external sync via hall effect sensors — 3600rpm, you wonder? SImple. 60 rotations per second, made the clocking easy. Modern ones, spinning up to 15K, are very simple DC servo motors with very, very complicated controllers that sense the speed via back EMF on the motor coils. Very trick, and useless in other projects, but once you’ve got the software, really cheap and fast.

The “Freeze the drive” trick is for problems with the spindle motor. A shorted coil in a motor keeps it from spinning. Freezing it can move the coil such that it isn’t shorting, and the drive spins. Whack the drive fixes stiction — a bearing, or a head, sticks to the platter, and it doesn’t have enough torque to spin the drive. A whack breaks things lose, and the motor can spin the disk.

That’s not the problem here.

The other motor is the head positioner. In the old days, these were stepper motors, and the stepper on the ST 3040A was legendary — guys would pray this drive would die so they could steal it. Steppers, however, are only so precise and fast, so modern drives use voice coils to quickly place the heads just so. Originally, there would be either a “wedge” on one of the platters that had tracks that the heads could use to quickly find tracks, or an entire side of a platter was used for dedicated information about where the tracks were. Modern drives use what’s called “embedded servo” information — the information about where the tracks lie is underneath the data, so you don’t lose the capacity of a wedge or dedicated servo.

This leads to the Whack Of Death. To move the heads, a current is sent in the voice coil, and the heads count the tracks as they cross the servo lanes. So, to move 50 tracks in, the coil charges, creating a magnetic field, and since it’s stuck between two really powerful magnets, it moves, and fast. The heads count tracks until they reach 50, then the current stops charging, and the heads stop.

What’s the whack? The whack is the heads hitting the stop that keeps them from moving off the platters completely. What is happening — the heads can’t tell where the tracks are, so they keep swinging, until they hit the stop. This gets noticed, the controller retracts the heads all the way to the center, and it tries again.

WHACK. WHACK. WHACK.

This means: 1) The heads can’t sense position information, and 2) The drive is almost certainly toast. 95% of the time, it’s the head that’s on the servo platter. 5% of the time, it’s a controller or power issue. You can try the drive in another computer, but usually, you ask the $1000 question, which is “Is the data on this drive, that I haven’t backed up recently, despite the lectures every sysadmin has given me repeatedly, worth $1000?”

That being the cost of sending the drive off to the clever guys with lots of toys who can read the data off.

IOW. The drive is almost certainly toast. If the data is really important, you can send it to a disk recovery place, who will charge you lots of money, and send back the data on CD or whatnot. If it’s not, you buy a new drive (or two and a mirroring controller) and resolve to be better about backups next time.

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The good news is, as I deal with my failing Hard Drives, I learn in the process and can pass information along to others by writing about it.  Thus a new category of this blog is born: Hard Drive Drama

I think that would be better than this all-at-once freak-out system people like me have with a single internal drive and an external to back-up on to manually.

People that do a lot of video editing are used to thinking about hard drives as little unreliable houses of cards, but most of us aren’t.

I like the idea of a more gradual form panic, or incremental panic… “Shit! I’m getting low on Hard Drives! Better get some more!”

Of course, Solid State Drives are just a few years around the corner. Those will surely be more reliable, right?

I should have shut everything down and done a permissions repair right then but I didn’t. Instead I kept trying to work and eventually ended up force-quitting a few programs that didn’t want to shut down in the background like Mail and iTunes… Finally, I decided I had better do a Permissions Repair and when I finally got started up from my Tiger Install DVD and launched the Disk Utility, my internal Hard Drive’s name had disappeared and the volume didn’t mount (pic)

My friend Arin turned me on to DiskWarrior a few years ago, the first time I had a Hard Drive Disappear. Some background information:

In the Disk Utility, a Hard Drive shows up as two things that both have a hard drive icon next to them: An actual device (in my case, “149.1 GB ST3160023AS”), and a volume (the greyed-out “disk0s3″). The Device is exactly that, the actual physical Hard Drive machine component. The Volume is the usable area of a Hard Drive that’s been formatted, the ‘software drive,’ if you will.

I learned early on that generally, moving files around and deleting them doesn’t really move them or delete them necessarily. It mostly just makes changes to a portion of the Volume called the Directory. The Directory is like an Index (or Card-Catalog) of all the files on the Volume. Over time changes made to the directory (by moving files around changing files deleting things etc) cause the Directory to become a big mess of, if you will, “amendments.” A convoluted Directory causes poor system performance (kind of like a lot of bureaucracy in your computer). Also, a convoluted Directory is much more susceptible to being rendered useless by a small amount of damage or missing data. And a useless Directory will make a Drive not even know who or what it is! This is what Defragmentation was all about in the old days. Defragging is like re-organizing the Index or perhaps like writing a whole new Card-Catalog for your hard-drive’s little Library. People say that defragging isn’t really necessary anymore, at least not for OSX machines, but whether or not that is true, a little damage to your hard drive’s Directory still definitely causes major trouble. And consider that information in your Directory is being changed every time you do just about anything including, and most relevantly to my denial, every time you shut down your computer the properly. This is how I can justify believing that my problems today are linked to the power-outage yesterday.

Anyways, on with the Documentation.

Here’s DiskWarrior being so rude as to imply that there’s something actually wrong with my drive other than a screwed up Directory. Notice “Speed reduced by disk malfunction: 1″

Finally DiskWarrior said that it couldn’t replace the Directory. (I didn’t get a picture or an exact quote because at the time I didn’t realize I would blog about this in this much detail. Next time.)

What does “Speed reduced by disk malfunction: 1″ mean?

[cricket sounds]

Four or Five months ago, the last time my internal Hard Drive crashed, I noticed that the guys at the apple store preferred “Drive Genius” to DiskWarrior. I even asked them:

“Is Drive Genius better than DiskWarrior?”

“Yeah. It’s better.” The guy called a Genius replied.

So a few hours ago, I decided to see if one of my few million closest friends owns a copy. And to my delight, one of my few million closest friends agreed to help me with my hard drive problem.

Unfortunately, Drive Genius couldn’t fix my directory either. Not yet anyways.

The thing is: I still don’t believe that it’s dead. To me, the errors in the log don’t look like physical damage/malfunction issues. To me it looks like the program is saying:

“Gosh. that’s too hard for me to fix.”

What does: “Invalid catalog btree reverse link in node – 13691 (0.13691).” mean?

[more crickets]

And I can’t just take this into the shop because I know that I can’t expect a technician that works at the Apple Store to care as much as I do about the music I make and other stuff on my drive. The easy way out for him/her is to re-format the drive and try to install osx on it fresh. If it works they can say “All better” and if there’s a problem after installation they can say “Hard drive was bad.” and just throw it away and replace it. Either way, I can say goodbye to everything since my last backup about 2 or 3 days ago (I know, I know. At least I back up at all). Certainly, I can’t expect anyone else to go through all the trouble of trying to both preserve the data, and figure out what’s up with the Drive.

Now I’m trying TechTool Deluxe and it says everything with the drive is fine up to the Volume Structure test (except the surface scan which I skipped because it takes forever and a problem in that department wouldn’t have stopped DiskWarrior or Disk Genius from working, I don’t think).

As I wait for it to finish analyzing the Volume Structure, I will predict the future: It will say that it needs to be fixed, offer to fix it, but then it will say that it’s too severely damaged to be repaired.

(a few minutes later) I was right about the first 2 parts… Volume Structure needs some help according to TechTool, and TechTool is offering to do some work for me. Note: It passed all the other tests which aids me in my denial of the possibility that there’s actually something physically wrong with my drive. I’m gonna go ahead and hit repair and see what happens (jaded fingers crossed).

To be continued, probably once techtool tells me it can’t do anything for me…

UPDATE:

All three predictions were accurate. Techtool said it could not fix my problem. Is there a such thing as Lazy Software?

Now I’m going to go ahead and do that surface scan just to see…

UPDATE (next morning)

I couldn’t wait for the Surface Scan to complete because it looked like it was going to take a week (literally) and at a certain point, time lost becomes more valuable than data lost…

Here’s what happened next: Before I went to sleep last night, I decided to see what would happen if I tried accessing the drive from another computer, so I started My computer up in “Target Mode,” (which makes the computer behave like a Firewire Drive) by holding down the “T” key as it booted and tried running DiskWarrior on my internal drive again, but this time from a Intel MacBook I borrowed for a few minutes.

I don’t thin it got to step 10 “Writing optimized replacement directory…” before…

At any rate, the process went a hundred times faster and more importantly, it actually worked!

Interestingly enough, last hard drive crash I had (only 4-5 months ago) I found that I was able to access the dead drive and transfer files to an external having connected to a second machine with FireWire 400 via Target Mode more effectively than thru the machine containing the drive itself, which made me suspect there might be something really spooky going on with the Logic Board or something. This time, similarly, what I couldn’t do with the official tools (Utility CD’s, Install DVD’s Etc), I could do with the help of Target Mode.

There it is! My Internal Hard Drive’s Name came back!

I’m not out of the woods though yet. The drive still wont boot the computer. It gets to the gray screen with apple logo and spinning thing and stays there and the fan comes on full bore (which is nice white noise to sleep to).

With my computer started back up in Target mode, using this Intel MacBook, I started a “Repair” with the Disk Utility and went to sleep.

When I woke up it had failed to repair anything. All kinds of bnode and other spooky problems like “siblings” etc… stuff I don’t know about.

I’m thinking about doing it again so I can save the report (I was in a hurry to give the Intel back before).

I got few of the most crucial files off the computer. What’s weird is how long it seemed to be taking. I don’t know if the slow speed is because of all these data problems (bnode shit), failing drive mechanics, or screwed up Hardware or Firmware in my computer, but it definitely moved really slow.

What I really want is to repair this drive and not lose anything.. I’m going to give it another day.

I still believe in my heart of hearts that the drive is physically functioning properly, and that this whole mess was caused by a power outage I had the other day in the middle of some intense processing.

I will update this again…

NEXT UPDATE:

Ok so… The machine still couldn’t boot from the drive, which got it’s name, “ZOMBIE” (because of the mess of files caused by my last major crash) back… I decided to try out getting the data off with Data Rescue II, but it was hanging for ever so I force-quit that and BANG! My drive disappeared altogether! Now, the device doesn’t even show up!

I’m almost completely done with my denial about the drive being fine and it really being the computer, because now the drive clicks. I’ve heard this click before. It’s a sad click. I found a great spiel on a forum about what causes a clicking Hard Drive and I decided to re-post/plagiarize it here on my blog.

I have some pictures to add to this post that are on a different computer, but other than that, I’m basically done with this post I think… I will update this one last time with the final conclusion of this, my latest Hard Drive Drama.

Til then…

UPDATE: The things I have left to try:

1. Put the Hard Drive in another Enclosure/Machine. Haven’t done this yet cause everything I have here is ATA (PATA) and the Drive is SATA…
2. Tap With Hammer. Saving that for last. I figure I should try all the non-hammer options first.

I already tried the freezer. I put the drive in a freezer bag, squeezed out all the air (to reduce condensation) put that in another bag (just to be extra careful) and put it in the freezer for a few hours… The idea is that if there’s a short in the voice-coil that moves the readers over the spinning platters, sometimes being really cold will cause enough shrinkage in the copper to un-short the coil. Sounds reasonable to me so I tried it. No luck. When I try the other 2 last resorts, I will update… Things aren’t looking too good though.

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