Help!!! Suddenly my HD is unformatted!

[Telepc]

So I recorded two songs last night, which went great. Today I sat down to do some mixing and one guitar overdub. It was a 44.1/24-bit session, with about 16 tracks playing and about 4 aux channels. System peformance wasn't even blipping on the meter. [160 gig ext FW drive, p4 2.2Ghz computer, 768 RAM]

I record-enabled my guitar track, hit record & play, and it made it through my pre-roll before it stopped and gave me an error (dangit--can't remember the number) that basically said PT couldn't keep up with the audio transfer from the HD, "which may need to be defragmented." (I'd just defraged two days ago). I checked the HD, everything was fine. I checked the playback engine, and raised the Level to Level 4. I was using 1024 buffer, but in low-latency monitoring for recording.

I tried again. This time, the blue light on the front of my HD just went out and PT froze. No matter how I tried to quit PT ("The program is not responding") it wouldn't quit. I was finally forced to do the hard-reset by holding down the power button for 5 seconds.

Now--ARGGGG--when I reboot, it says that my external HD is unformatted, "Would you like to format now?" (NO!!!] Nothing in my system can read that disk--not Disk Cleanup, not Disk Defragmenter, nothing.

Ummmmm, help? I'd hate to think that those sessions I did last night for a good friend are gone.

[basschair]

What kind of HD, what kind of external drive, what kind of connection, what OS? I don't know a whole lot about external drives yet (just started with one), but whoever will help will probably need to know all of this stuff. Good luck!

[neatguys]

Any luck yet? Check your email.

[Telepc]

What kind of HD, what kind of external drive, what kind of connection, what OS? I don't know a whole lot about external drives yet (just started with one), but whoever will help will probably need to know all of this stuff. Good luck!

Iogear Ion 160 Gb HD, Firewire connection, stock firewire port AND Adaptec FireConnect. XP home OS.

[Telepc]

Any luck yet? Check your email.

No luck yet--just got your email--I'll try it ASAP. Thanks!!!

[Telepc]

Well, it's as bad as it can be. Every single file was in some way damaged, so even after moving the files from the HD to another HD, the songs wouldn't play. This is probably some strange issue with how the files got renamed when the drive crashed, but unlike neatguys above, none of my data was salvagable.

Once again, have I suffered because I didn't use the one or two HDs that Digi recommends? Maybe. How much difference can there be in firewire, 7200 RPM external hard drives? Sheesh.

I wish I could tell if this WAS a problem with the HD, because then I'd go buy a Western Digital or something and hope for the best, but it simply isn't worth the money to be wrong. Every session I've done since getting this rig two weeks ago is lost forever. I can't see how I can risk that again.

Whereas, my crappy P2-450 Windows98 machine running Cubase (which I can barely stand to use) has yet to fail in 4 years. Sure it's crashed occasionally--all software does, but I've never lost a single sequence or song file because of it.

What a complete disaster this was.

[QuikDraw]

Once again, have I suffered because I didn't use the one or two HDs that Digi recommends?

Absolutely not! You've suffered because you did not have a proper backup plan. Anything you care about on a computer should exist in AT LEAST two places.

Any hard drive can crash or otherwise have problems, Digi recommended or not. IDE drives are actually referred to by some in the industry as "disposable drives," because they are made cheaply, and a certain percentage of them are expected to fail prematurely. The industry considers the cost savings to be a reasonable trade for the loss of reliability.

That's one of the reasons that mission-critical storage solutions cost so much--they're not "disposable storage."

I know, I know... I've got gigabytes of stuff lying around here that ain't backed up either! But when my drives crash (and they eventually will!) I won't blame anyone but myself for the lost data. Data loss can be prevented.

In case it's not obvious, I'm sorry to hear of your data loss. It's a real bummer when that happens. Same thing happened to me about a year ago. No backups--my fault.

Mike

[bknight2]

If you look for a new drive, dont go western digital...that companys drives are garbage (IMHO from years of bad luck with their HDs). Try Seagate...You get what you pay for. And invest in a DVDBurner...this way you can make DVD backups of everything every night.

PEACE
Bknight2

[VanDerGraf]

Balony. I've had about thirty Western Digital drives over the last 10 years and only had one go south, which they promptly replaced. I am currently using five WD drives that work excellent.

[Telepc]

Well, again, a HUGE thanks to neatguys, who saved the day by sending me a little helper app to revive the things on the blown HD. One of the two songs was fully recovered after all, but the other is simply gone.

Quikdraw is certainly right that I should have backed up. My anger came though because I couldn't believe (and am still having trouble) that the HD just chose then to die, 14 days old that it was. I was pretty sure that ProTools killed it.

Today I feel much better, and yes, I realize that ProTools can't kill hard drives. I should have guessed this might happen, since all the 160 Gb hard-drives at CompUSA and MicroCenter (and in catalogs) were between $220 and $300, and my 160 Gb Iogear "Ion" was only $160.

I got a really nice Seagate today, and I loaded the recovered session onto it. I was then easily able to finish the session (add new guitar parts), mix, then BTD.

Then I created a new 16-track session and record-enabled all the tracks at once, pushed record, and walked away for an hour. When I came back, it was still going strong.

Call it the PeteC test--checking to see if the rig will record 16 tracks of a live band one set at a time.

Thanks again to neatguys, and to all others for their suggestions.