Crashed firewire drive Help!!

[KenSluiter]

I have a Mercury Elite 80 GB FW drive (w/ 911 chipset) that was formatted w/ Apple drive Setup that has worked without a hitch for months now.
I spent two weeks on another project that used my SCSI drives, so I powered this particular drive down since I wasn't using it.
Yesterday, when I re-booted the system; I turned the drive back on. When the finder came up, I got the prompt, "This disk is unrecognized.... "with a choice to Reinitialize or eject.
What happened here?
I tried all my disk utility programs (Disk First Aid,Tech Tool Pro, Disk Warrior), but none recognize the drive. Do I need newer versions?
The drive is basically backed up onto an AIT, but that's almost 60GB, and that will take all day to restore! I don't have a free day at this point in time. And I don't want to just re-initilize the drive, restore the data, and pretend everything is OK. Either I'm doing something wrong, or I have a defective drive.
Also, I had the same experience w/ another FW drive (same make& model) and first aid fixed it right away. That drive still mounts fine, as does another Maxtor FW drive I have.
But again, that Maxtor drive failed once; and I haven't used it for anything critical since because I don't trust it.
I puchased 2 Mercury Elite FW drives because they seemed to be the most recommended FW drive on this forum.
If using FW means crashing a drive every few months; I think that's un-acceptable for professional work.
Any insights would be greatly,greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Ken Sluiter

[zeeman]

i have had great luck( so far) with the owc drives, i have been using them for over a year now. early on i had 1 drive do the same thing you had happen. but at the time i was using third party drivers and after i worked all of that out, i have been trouble free.
you said the drive was off so over heating woudn't be the problem.( keep these owc's cool/there's no internal fan)
what you could try is taking the drive out of the case and try getting it to mount by hooking it up directly to the mac. if you have an open bay in your mac just pop it in. i did get a crashed firewire drive to come back through this method.(it wasn't an owc)
hope any of this helps and good luck.

cmz

[Boom Chic]

Try booting with the MAC OS Base extension set.

Will the drive boot if you do that?

Did you install any 3rd(tird party) party firewire extensions? If so disable them.

The OS 9.2.2 FW drivers are the best.

[Esteban]

Just wondering, Did you launch Disk Warrior FIRST then power up the drive??

If not try it.
Esteban.

[Bob Olhsson]

My experience was that Disk First Aid can't see a firewire disk until it has been initialized with "erase disk." Could Disk First Aid see it before?

[Lee Blaske]

I puchased 2 Mercury Elite FW drives because they seemed to be the most recommended FW drive on this forum.
If using FW means crashing a drive every few months; I think that's un-acceptable for professional work.
Any insights would be greatly,greatly appreciated.

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I know there are proponents of OWC here. To me, they look like a great medium-duty highly portable solution, but for day to day pro use, I want a more robust case with a heavy duty power supply and a fan to keep the drive cool. If I'm really relying on it, I want all the cards stacked in my favor. (BTW, OWC also markets a case with a fan.)

Knock on wood, Granite Digital (www.granitedigital.com) has never let me down. They've got some very nice enclosures these days with some interesting monitoring capabilities, and they don't cost a fortune, either.

I agree with another poster that removing the drive and putting it into the Mac itself is the next step if the other recommendations don't pan out.

Personally, although I have yet to be let down by any drive EVER (either I'm lucky, or I just live right), I don't take chances. Drives are so cheap these days that's it's foolish not to have a back-up drive to copy information from important sessions to at convenient points. I've just made it part of my routine. After doing any significant work on a particular project (e.g. when the singers or players leave), before I take a break, I just drag the session to my safety disk.

BTW, what was the brand of the drive that just failed?

Lee Blaske

[Ricky Cobble]

I've had good luck launching first aid and then powering up the drive.

[AINSLIE]

I have had some success pulling the drive from the case and pytting it on an internal bus. I have had a case die - the drive was fine however

Good luck

Ainslie

[KenSluiter]

Thank You, Esteban. That did the trick!!
Thank You again. I'll have to remember that one!

[KenSluiter]

Actually, now that I think of it,Thank you all !