Disk Warrior 4.4 running for 10 days!!

Hi Guys,

Please let me know if you can help. I apologise in advance for the lengthy message it contains all my relevant information, which may point to a solution.

My 10 day Dilemma: Last week Sunday (today is Wednesday) whilst my Lacie 1 tb hardrive was on I was currently editing a video piece on my Mac book pro Final cut version 7 as normal.
My 1 tb drive had a bout 300gb free.

The Lacie drive started experiencing difficulties whilst I was backing up my work on Apple’s Time Machine function, it wouldn’t boot the hardrive as an option on my computer. It would show the hardrive only in Macs “Disk Utility”
I tried a variety of options turning on and off the computer and hardrive, changing power cables, fire wire cables. I also checked the Lacie Hardrive on a Pc and it booted so this gave me a feeling that it at least could be repaired on Disk Utility on my Mac.

I followed a few online examples in which I changed the casing on my Lacie 1 tb with another identical 1 tb drive. After changing casing on the drives the hardrive, which previously was un readable, was still unreadable by my mac book pro and the one that worked still was readable.

Last week Monday I started Disk warrior 4.4 on Mac it has been running for nearly 10! Full days and is still going. Even though I cannot click on the disk warrior application it has the spinning beach ball, but the numbers of Disk Malfunctions are painfully slowly climbing.

I don’t know how long it has to go but I am thinking to cancel and seek other methods.

I have read on this site and on other forums some People using it online said it could take between

1 – 4 days. I have seen others going on 3 weeks ?? I am at 10 days.
The files are important and contain client files, the capture files of a project I was working on. Most of the finished files are backed up but there are files such as digitised footage for projects I was in the process of working on. I have no other way to retrieve those files as the only place they exist is on this drive.

Questions I would like your help on please:
What would the damage be to my external drive if I were to cancel during step 5 of Disk Warrior?

As my External drive was previously bootable on a pc (which I checked before starting disk warrior 10 days ago) I am thinking to maybe cancel disk warrior try booting on the pc and connecting another drive to copy the files over. Do you think this would work?

Has anybody ever been in a similar positions in which Step 5 has hanged for so long, with a similar amount of Disk Malfunctions I have and it actually turned out for Drive to be fixed, repaired and work smoothly afterwards?

My 10-day Disk warrior current readings:
Rebuilding directory / Step 5 Locating directory data…
Speed reduced by disk malfunctions 55,149

I would really appreciate your help and assistance guys?
FC

Yes I use the diskwarrior but only on internal drives
On 1 TB internal drive it takes about 10 min including rebuilding .
And yes on a internal drive I have use the cancel function at step 5 , and quit the diskwarrior .
No damage done .
Ok the transfer rate of a external USB drive is much slower but 10 days that is a lot of time .
And if you use a Wireless external hd that is even more slower than a USB drive in this case yes it takes very very long time

This is just my opinion... you'll have to decide. Since the files are critical to your work, I would allow Disk Warrior to complete its task even if it does take another week. Stopping things now and trying to do a copy may inflict more damage causing you to have to use a data recovery service which can be very expensive.

Hi there,

Out of interest, did this ever finish? Did you get your data back?

I'm currently 3 days into rebuilding a damaged 750GB internal HDD and I'm considering cutting my losses. I'll have to unplug my laptop in a further 3 days time so if it hasn't rebuilt by then I will have to lose progress anyway. As it stands I'm wasting time waking up every morning and ckecking whether it's finished.

If I cut my losses I'll have to go back to a one-month old backup which I'm reluctant to do but it's not the end of the world.