PT LE 8.0.3, vanishing files and damaged discs

[kropa]

Hello to all!

I would like to share a short experience with PT 8.0.3. Maybe something like this happened to someone else? I've sifted though some last threads and didn't find anything fitting my problem.

About a month ago I was recording foley with my friend on PT HD 8.0.1cs3 on a Prolific chipset external disc. Everything was going ok, we've finished recording at 6am, and exhausted decided to do backup at home. Few days before my friend's external disc failed, I think it was MyBook WD. He said, that he opened a PT session, listened for about 30 seconds, than he heard noise, saw the colorful circle and the disc vanished from desktop. Next thing the system wanted to initialize the disc. His setup is SL, PT LE 8.0.3, MacBook Pro (the new one with black keyboard).

So, day after, I get a call, that the Prolific disc, we've recorded foley at, broke down. My friend pluged it in to his computer and before making backup he wanted to listen to some effects. And then he had the same situation - about 30 sec everything is ok, then noise, circle and nothing. He plugged the disc again, this time though USB. SL did see the disc, so he simply copied all he needed, meaning our recording session, and unmounted the disc. Then he opened the session from his HDD and was very surprised, when he heard some modulated noise instead footsteps. Opening audio files though other programs didn't do much - still our effects sounded like noisy [bleep][bleep][bleep][bleep].

So he brought the disc to me. We've ran it though DiscWarrior and all we've got out of it, was the information that "The disc is too damaged to fix it". So we took some heavy equipment - Stellar Phoenix. Of course the program saw the disc, even saw the catalog structure, so we've ran the program, that recovers data even after formatting. About 20 hours later, the program recovered everything from the disc, even files I forgot that were there once. All besides the files, that were used by PT 8.0.3 at my friend's computer. The catalog from the recording after recovery contained only "Session File Backup" folder and some versions of session files created earlier. Like all audio, fade and video linked to that particular session never existed on the disc.

We're still thinking what was the problem. Disc (but two independent disc crashed)? ProTools 8.0.3? Or maybe FireWire port on his computer? Or maybe PT has some troubles in this version with communicating with external discs? We've recovered all files from that broken disc except those, that were used by that session.

Best for everyone