I'm experiencing extreme problems with my PB 15" and external harddrives connected through firewire. I have a couple of harddrives (2 IBM 120GB and 1 IBM 80GB) which I connect to my PB with firewire. To do so, I need to swap the drives in the external drivebay as I only have one 5/1,4" bay.
Everything went well until recently when my PB would not find the 80GB harddisk anymore - I lost 10GB of Software and a lot of other stuff. At first I thought it was only the drive that got bad - there are quite a few rumors about failing IBM drives out there.
BUT NOW ONE OF MY 120GB DRIVES HAS NOT BEEN RECOGNIZED BY MY PB AS WELL.
I really need help with this issue as I can't afford loosing another drive with all the data on it - this one is full, I mean we are talking about 120GB of valuable data - and please don't tell me to do backups. How can I make a backup of a 120GB drive, with CDs? Nope! With DVDs? Not really an option either. With Ultrium? Way too expensive for a student.
Please, can anyone shed some light on this topic? Are there known problems with Powerbooks and external firewire harddisks? What can I do to protect my data, now that the drives was not recognizerd the first time? With the 80GB drive I was able to mount the drive two more times after the first initial failure. After that two more times The harddisk was not recognized anymore.
PB: data loss with external Firewire harddrive
