How To fix a broken drive

[JanneJansson]

Hi,

I just had a near-death moment when a critical drive failed for me.
BUT I managed to fix it and this is how I did it (under osx):

Drive (external firewire drive) lost it Volume header and would not mount up. All data was still there but the "index" of the drive was bad.

I tried "Repair Disk" under Disk Utility
The disk tool just said "could not reapait because of an error"

Then I connected the drive using esata, and tried again.
Same, but now could I see more info about the drive anyway.

Then I used the command line tool:
> sudo su
**root password**

and
> ls /dev/*disk*

Then I got a list of all connected drives to the computer. I had no idea what drive was who, so I disconnected all drived exept the bad one.

The internal drive of the computer is
/dev/disk0

so the bad drive should be
/dev/disk1

then I did:
> fsck_hfs -fr /dev/disk1*

This too failed, but going back and forth the "Repair Disk" under Disk Utility and the fsck command a few times it finally FIXED IT!!! :)

Some of the files got moved to a new folder called "lost+found"

Hope this will help :)

Cheers

[Von Thomas]

This may also help the next time. Diskwarrior (http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html), it has come to the rescue more times than I can count.

p.s. Repair permissions of your boot drive will also help keep things in order. Do this before you install new software, after you install new software, and as a routine once a week.

[JanneJansson]

Cool, will get :)

During my moment of panic, I also found some cool plugs for using NTFS drives with mac.

First download:
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

Then:
http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

Then you have read/write just same as DOS-FAT drives, but no 2GB file size limit. Very good for me because I have to deliver final master of a film to a color grading company that use a NuCoda (PC) machine, that can't read HFS+ drives.