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.
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.