Hard Drive "Missing"

[monkey man]

When I booted today, the Finder told me that I'd inserted unreadable media or something. I can't remember what the window said as I figured it was an anomaly (I've had a few of late) and closed it.

Then I noticed that my "bay 2" drive partitions were missing from the devices pane in Finder windows.
DU's reduced the partitions (it's my audio drive, and should have fast, normal and backup partitions) to a single, generic entity labelled, "Media", and claims that it's unformatted.
This is not great; the drive's done no work yet other than obviously spinning up whilst the Mac is on and when I filled it with everything audio.
It's a "new" SATA WD 500GB bought in February. System Profiler reports that "there was an error while scanning for Serial-ATA devices", and shows me nothing.

Help please, someone!

PS: I've not rebooted yet as I'm waiting for my internet connection to time out first; will try it in 2 hours.

[monkey man]

OK, I've rebooted now, and the message reads:
"The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer."

If I "get info" in DU, this is what I get:

Name : Media
Type : Disk

Partition Map Scheme : Unformatted
Disk Identifier : disk1
Media Name : Media
Media Type : Generic
Connection Bus : Serial ATA 2
Connection ID : "Bay 2"
Device Tree : /PCI0@0/SATA@1F,2/PRT1@1/PMP@0/@0:0
Bay : "Bay 2"
Writable : Yes
Ejectable : No
Mac OS 9 Drivers Installed : No
Location : Internal
Total Capacity : 0 Bytes
S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported
Disk Number : 1
Partition Number : 0

Any clues there?
This is my first ever WD failure; I've always sworn by the brand.

Could it be that my house is a tad cold for it (11-13ºC)?

[monkey man]

`
Another day goes by and only one thing's changed:
Now when I boot up, the message window no longer appears.

All other data (in DU) appears to be unchanged.

Help, please someone... anyone...

[bkshepard]

Hey M.M., sorry to hear about the drive. Does Disk Utility not give you the option to repair the drive? It's been a long time since I've needed to recover a drive, but always used something like Disk Warrior in the past. Do you have anything like that available?

[monkey man]

Hey, thank you for replying, Brian.

No, the verify and repair fields for both permissions and general repair are grayed out (4 boxes).
I'm not keen to try erasing and repartitioning the disk until I'm certain the data thereon (it was full!) is recoverable.
FWIW, it was my audio drive; that's why it's done no work yet. LOL

No other apps, I'm afraid; I've always been fine with Apple only.

EDIT: Thought I'd double-check the fields in the other tabbed windows, and it turns out they're grayed out too (even the erase options!).
Bummer.

[bkshepard]

I completely understand about not erasing/reformatting the drive. I had this happen a number of years ago and was able to recover all my data with Disk Warrior. It's been a long time since I had to do that, and I can't speak for the veracity of DW in its current iteration (perhaps others can chime in here), but it worked like a charm for me. Usually, the data on the drive are fine, it's just the header and info part of the drive that's damaged. A drive repair application like DW can usually either repair the drive's header info, or allow you to copy the data onto another drive. Good luck.

And remember, B*n > or = CH*n

[monkey man]

Ha! Thank you Brian.

Perhaps I can find a free app that'll do this; it sounds pretty basic.

[jcfelice88keys]

Hello Monkey Man,

I feel your pain.

By chance, do you have another computer you can borrow/use to see if the WD Drive boots up to that machine? Depending on the results, you might isolate whether the problem is in the HD or the system on the current 'puter.
My two cents' worth.

Joe

[monkey man]

Thanks man.

I thought of that too, but alas, I'm rather isolated in this (and practically every other!) regard.

Same behaviour again today.
At this point I'm naively hoping it'll somehow sort itself out, but I do plan to look for a free utility of the disk-doctor variety.

[bkshepard]

Given that the drive, at least, shows up in System Profiler, that's a pretty good indication that the drive itself is okay. I suspect it is a corrupt header problem that a disk repair type program should be able to resolve. Good luck!

[bongo_x]

...but I do plan to look for a free utility of the disk-doctor variety...

If you don't have anything important on the drive that would be fine, but I don't know what you're going to find that's better than the built in disk utility. I use Applejack and I'm a big fan, but it's just using the built in utilities, fsck for the disk repair.

The problem is that you often don't get two chances to fix things, that is, if you try one utility and it doesn't work it has often screwed things up even more and can't be fixed after that.

Disk Warrior is my strongest recommendation. I don't group it with other utilities since it has NEVER caused a problem for me, and I can't say that about any other utility.

If you have a backup (surely you do) or there's nothing important on the drive just erase it and start over.

bb

[monkey man]

Thank you for that, Bongo. The backup I have is a little out of date, but it's mostly there.
This is the "original copy" drive though, my audio recording one.

I figured as much about the possible side-effects of using utilities (you mentioned possible undoable corruption), so for now am quite happy to patiently ride this one out.

Returning it to the store will be my last resort though, not least because the logistics of this will prove challenging.

[Tonio]

MM, try Data rescue.

The demo you can only get a few MB, but I finally got it to wake up the HD
on old SCSI (whats that?).

T

[Tonio]

doh

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

[monkey man]

That's what I'm talkin' 'bout, Tonio!
Exploring the link.

Hmm.. 500k?
It seems to be intended for the recovery of files (which I'd have nowhere to copy too - there's too much data), rather than for reviving "lost" drives.

I'm downloading the demo in case it allows a simple mount or fix of some sort.
Downloading...