Possible Catastrophic Drive Failure (External)

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Well, Sunday afternoon I am sitting and running through installing my Bootcamp'd Win7 when I hear a crash and a skid in the kitchen. My cat decided to play "knock the crap off the counter game" and my external 1TB hard drive I use for iTunes and Time Machine is laying on the floor with a cracked case. Now, I know I should not have just left it out, but it had been there all morning and the cat had full food bowl and water bowl.

Anyway, I go and check the drive, push the case back together and give it a quick shake and listen. Nothing sounded wrong and there was no rattling. I plug it in and it comes up in the Finder and I can browse and whatnot. I leave it in to see what happens.

About an hour later, Time Machine kicks off and within about 5 minutes the drive disappears from the Finder and Time Machine reports it has failed because the drive has been pulled from the PC without being properly dismounted. Wait, what? It is still plugged in and spinning.

So, I unplug the drive and try plugging it back in: nothing. It doesn't come back up until I reboot. I run the Disk Utility and Verify and Restore and it seems to work again. For a few minutes.

Now, Last week I had to copy all the iTunes (400g) from this same drive onto my MBP HD in order to reformat it to be useable by the MBP. I had since deleted and emptied my Trash since then.

Is there a chance the iTunes media can be recovered even after emptying the Trash?

I am really dreading that I will have to send this hard drive to be recovered at way to costly a price, but there is too much on it I need and own. 8 years of iTunes songs, movies, apps, everything.
 

RavingMac

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What about pulling the HDD and putting it in another external enclosure?
Possible its the case and not the drive itself . . . ..

BTW: This is just one in a long string of cat-related cat-tastrophes reported here. :\
Hope everything works out for you

EDIT: There are some Mac data recovery programs out there; I haven't used any of them but I understand that they often allow a free trial to see if the data is visible--you then have to buy the program to do the recovery. Obviously, if you go this route you will want to download to an external drive to avoid any further over-writing of your precious and hopefully recoverable data.
 
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Deckyon
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Yeah. I looked at the drive and it is built into the connections so swapping to a different enclosure will not work. That is the first thing I tried. ****ed USB3 drives.

I am looking at some piece of software called "StellarPhoenix" and see what it finds. I have another drive ordered and ready to be picked up after work. I can see where it is finding some files, but, will they be restored to the Trash can already set up in the original directory structure like it was when it was deleted? Could not find the text for that on the website. It has found 188 GB so far, so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

And this after it took a week to fix the iTunes library...
 

chscag

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I've used Stellar Phoenix before (Windows version) and it worked real well, however, most folks that I know who have used it with their Mac have not had real good luck with it.

You might also wish to give Data Rescue 3 a try. That seems to be the most recommended data recovery software. I believe they have a trial version which you can test with first before buying. ($99.00)
 
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Quick Update

After making sure I was getting backups again with Time Machine, I have started working on restoring my iTunes media (movies, books, music, audiobooks, apps). For anyone who may possibly run into this issue in the future, I will post what steps I have taken to get the media back in place.

This has been a stressful week for me. I had a ton of money in iTunes with Audiobooks, Music, Apps and some movies and TV shows. To lose them would cripple me and to replace them would break me...

1. Make a copy of your iTunes library directory in your profile. I zipped mine and deleted the files forcing iTunes to create new library files. This way, you will not damage your previous settings.
2. Use some kind of tool to recover the files from the hard drive. I used Data Rescue 3 (mentioned above) to scan my HD and recover the files to the new external drive. This will take some time and you will get files with some very weird file names. Unfortunately Data Rescue 3 (and all the others) cannot bring the directory structure back from the grave.
3. Open and update (if needed) iTunes before trying to add back any media. I sat at this step for 3 days, afraid to continue even though I was hopeful. I didnt want to deal with the disappointment of having to manually rename and organize just short of 50,000 files.
4. Go through the recovery data and separate out the different file types. DR3 will do a decent job, but you want to make sure all your iTunes files are in one directory structure. I had a Movies dir, TV Shows dir, Apps Dir and Books dir. The books will end up under a "documents" directory in the restore area. You need ".epub" files and the ".pdf" files as well (if you added PDFs into your library.)
5. I started iTunes and went to the preferences to make sure the Media folder was pointing to the same directory as before. Also make sure you have "Copy files to folder" and "Let iTunes manage media" checked.
6. I went to "Add Folder to Library" and selected the Books for the initial test. Low and behold my eBooks were pulled into iTunes, renamed to the proper name and put in the right directory. The relief was intense and felt good. iTunes really did pick up on the metadata in the file and used it during the import phase to recreate the structure.
7. I then did the same for my Movies, TV Shows and iOS Apps. iTunes picked up on all the metadata from those as well. I had to redownload some of the apps, but hey, 15 downloads is certainly better than 475.

Pause: Now, that is nearly all the stuff I needed with the exception of my Music and Audiobooks. The thing with that is they were the most data and largest number of files. As I am typing this, iTunes is importing my music and audiobooks. I will update later on how successful this went.

Note: Since some things got deleted more than once (from the initial time I copied all the media to the MBP's HD so I could format the external and then copy back to the external) and when I was trying something else and was moving large chunks of media back and forth, I had duplicates of some files, creating duplicates in iTunes. No biggie, just had to go through and delete the dupes (and the files). I expect the same will happen when I get all the music and audiobooks imported.
 

BrianLachoreVPI


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Seriously. Cats should be sold with a warning label!! Someone here has something to the effect of 'water and electronics don't mix' in their sig - maybe we should modify that slightly :)
 

RavingMac

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Glad things look like they make work out well after all. :)
 

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