Vanishing files on firewire drive

F

festfan

Registered
I recently bought a 1TB Seagate FreeAgent Pro drive that I have partitioned 14 ways and hooked up via a firewire 400 connection to my eMac G4 1.0GHz running OS X 10.4.11. I use four of the 60GB partitions to store music files in several different folders.

My problem is this: Frequently after I boot up the drive, I open iTunes and it gives me a broken link, saying it can't find such and such a song. I look in the folder where the file should be and it's GONE -- sometimes along with all the other files in the same folder, occasionally with other files still present. (Are they invisible, maybe?) I search for the missing file in the Finder and sure enough it shows up, but as an outline icon with no folder path. I run Disk Utility to verify permissions on the affected disk and it tells me everything is fine. Then the file suddenly shows up properly again and iTunes can recognize it.

I always unmount the partitions before I shutdown the external drive by unplugging the power cable, and the files that are stored there seem to work fine -- once the computer can see them -- so I don't think the data is corrupted. But I am very fearful of storing more data on any of the drive's partitions until I can figure out why files intermittently disappear. I am afraid that if I copy new files to the drive while others are temporarily "missing" that I may overwrite them because the computer thinks there is free space on the drive that isn't really free. I suppose I could run disk permissions every time I boot the external drive, but what a pain is that?

Is this an issue with the FreeAgent Pro drives? An issue with how I'm shutting down/booting up? An issue with my system software? An issue with firewire? I've used other firewire externals for four years on this machine without problems, and I've had no issues with Seagate, which have always been 100 percent reliable (for me).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Yes, all the partitions mount fine. I partitioned the drive with Disk Utility right out of the box, all formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Even when particular files disappear, the partitions on which they are located all seem to be mounted and accessible.
 
Hey, the same thing happens to me with my 750 GB Seagate FreeAgent. It's partitioned into two drives. 250 and 500 GB approx. They'll mount, but the files inside have vanished. I've been running Disk Warrior to rebuild the directories, and they reappear. I'm thinking it's a partitioning related problem. Anybody have any insights?
 
festfan said:
I always unmount the partitions before I shutdown the external drive by unplugging the power cable
Click to expand...

You should unmount the partitions by right clicking them and selecting unmount.
Just unplugging the power cable is not a very good idea, and could be the reason
for your problems. In the long run you will have problems with corrupted files
using that method.
 
What I have discovered since my original post is that the files are all fine on the drive. What is happening is that the partitions are somehow unmounting themselves even though their icons remain on the desktop. If I go into Disk Utility and unmount then quickly remount a partition, it shows up properly for iTunes. It is annoying to have to continuously do this, however.
 
Just to get this correctly: There are *no* files vanishing, just the volumes disappearing - but *not* from the Finder? I seriously ain't sure what exactly is vanishing.
 
Yes, the files are all on the drive. Even if I can't actually see them when I open their partition in the Finder, I can locate their icons in Searchlight. But I can't open them until after I first unmount then remount the partition they are on.

I never receive a message like unexpected device removal or anything. If I boot up the drive at the time I launch iTunes then it usually works fine. But if I boot up the drive and wait more than about a minute before launching a file in iTunes, it gives me the little file missing gray exclamation mark and I have to do the Disk Utility trick.

I don't know if this is a problem specific to the FreeAgent drive or iTunes or perhaps even my computer running under Tiger. I'm just looking for a permanent solution.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top