Help, my external drive has given up - is there anything I can do?

[ian27]

Hey guys,

I currently have an eMac with two external firewire lacie hard drives.

This evening whilst I was working, I suddenly noticed my computer get very slow and that one of the external drives had been unmounted from my desktop. I restarted the computer but still couldn't see anything, so I turned off the external drive at the mains and turned it on again. The driver reappeared again - hurrah! That was until I decided to try and open some of the folders and it would take forever and eventually would unmount the drive again. Hmmm...

So I shut down the computer, turned the drive on and off again, and booted up. Everything was fine. I then went into disk utility and tried to repair the disc from within there. It couldn't and gave me the following error message...

Repairing disk for “drive_a”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
Overlapped node allocation
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)

Repair attempted on 1 volume
0 HFS volumes repaired
1 volume could not be repaired

I don't really know what this means, but it certainly doesn't sound very healthy. I have a copy of Alsoft's Disk Warrior, so I popped in the disc and continued to try to repair the directory with this. No joy at all - whilst it was trying to read the directory, I just got the spinning wheel and no progress until I eventually forced quit the programme.

The ironic thing about this is that my company were worried that we might lose some data from these drives as we were running very short on hard drive space, so they ordered a much larger third external drive to back all of this data up. This drive is due to arrive tomorrow (I know, you couldn't make this stuff up if you tried). I'll be happy to re-initialise the drive if I can back up some of the essential data that is on it, but I can't even get at the data to even start backing it up.

Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

Thank you.

Ian

[Satcomer]

The only trick that I seen work (they only got some of the data) is literally freeze the drive (without getting moisture in it) and then quickly putting it in enclosure. They only had minutes before the drive found it's bad sector and died again. The only other way is a program called Data Rescue 2.