frazer
04-01-2009, 07:33 PM
There have been several threads, lately, about Red Drives crashing during formatting and having other issues. I'm one of the fellows who was having problems and monitoring those threads, but no word from Red or anyone else who knew what was wrong or what to do.
My drive was crashing, regularly during fomatting and preventing me from trying a re-format, again (as in the camera didn't recognize that there was a drive plugged into it), until I'd refomatted it on a computer, first.
Through some random experiment, I seem to have repaired my drive, and wanted to share what seems to have worked for me.
I haven't done exhaustive testing, yet (as in shooting more than a few test shots--haven't shot a whole day or a week or a month...), but as of the last time I was shooting, it crashed 5 times in a row when trying to format the drive, and I was not able to get it back up, at all (thank goodness for CF cards--we ended up having to use the Red Drive as an external drive to dump the CF cards to...). But since I did the following, things seem happy in Drive land.
I can't promise that this will work for you, and I didn't go about it scientifically (as in there are a lot of variables at play), but here's what I did:
-Plugged the crashed drive into my Mac.
-Opened "Disk Utility" and ERASED it, restoring it to a DOS (FAT) format.
-VERIFIED and REPAIRED it.
-ERASED it, again, formatting as a Mac disk.
-Opened Disk Warrior and "REBUILT" it (in the Mac version of Disk Warrior, you can't Rebuild a DOS disk, btw).
-ERASED it, once more, using Disk Utility and formatted it back to DOS (FAT).
-Took it to the camera and formatted it again.
Since doing that, I've been able to format it approx 20 times (mostly sequentially, just to see if if would remain happy) with no crashes or other trouble. I formatted it at every different frame rate (23.98-59.94) in 4K and 2K.
My guess is that there was some sort of fragmentation going on (but what kind, I have no idea). And exactly what step(s) in that process fixed the problem, is anyone's guess. But life is much better than it was, and that's what matters at the end of the day.
I hope this helps out some of you with similar weird drive problems. Let us all know if it fixes your problems.
Cheers,
Frazer
My drive was crashing, regularly during fomatting and preventing me from trying a re-format, again (as in the camera didn't recognize that there was a drive plugged into it), until I'd refomatted it on a computer, first.
Through some random experiment, I seem to have repaired my drive, and wanted to share what seems to have worked for me.
I haven't done exhaustive testing, yet (as in shooting more than a few test shots--haven't shot a whole day or a week or a month...), but as of the last time I was shooting, it crashed 5 times in a row when trying to format the drive, and I was not able to get it back up, at all (thank goodness for CF cards--we ended up having to use the Red Drive as an external drive to dump the CF cards to...). But since I did the following, things seem happy in Drive land.
I can't promise that this will work for you, and I didn't go about it scientifically (as in there are a lot of variables at play), but here's what I did:
-Plugged the crashed drive into my Mac.
-Opened "Disk Utility" and ERASED it, restoring it to a DOS (FAT) format.
-VERIFIED and REPAIRED it.
-ERASED it, again, formatting as a Mac disk.
-Opened Disk Warrior and "REBUILT" it (in the Mac version of Disk Warrior, you can't Rebuild a DOS disk, btw).
-ERASED it, once more, using Disk Utility and formatted it back to DOS (FAT).
-Took it to the camera and formatted it again.
Since doing that, I've been able to format it approx 20 times (mostly sequentially, just to see if if would remain happy) with no crashes or other trouble. I formatted it at every different frame rate (23.98-59.94) in 4K and 2K.
My guess is that there was some sort of fragmentation going on (but what kind, I have no idea). And exactly what step(s) in that process fixed the problem, is anyone's guess. But life is much better than it was, and that's what matters at the end of the day.
I hope this helps out some of you with similar weird drive problems. Let us all know if it fixes your problems.
Cheers,
Frazer