Please help: External Drives in RAID 1- Mysterious Damaged Files- OSX Can't Repair

[hhayden86]

Alright, I'll try and be detailed but not long-winded

So, I have 2x 3TB Seagate Hard Drives enclosed in an Akitio NT2 U3 setup in Raid 1. This is my primary backup.

**I purchased all this in North America and have since moved to Germany. However, I did check the enclosure's power supply rating and it's good up to 240V so no problem there.**

A month or so ago, the drives were acting funny. Namely, they'd disconnect sporadically to which I'd get the 'Your hard drive was not properly ejected' notice over and over. Exasperated, I turned it off and decided to buy a new cord (which I neglected to do and kind of forgot about this whole issue until now). Because of this, I hadn't been using the back up very much over the past month or so and all new data was being stored on my computer and other external drives. The night before last however, I turned it on and transfered 5gb or so onto the backup from an external drive.
The next day when I turned it on it didn't seem to want to mount. I tried the usual easy tricks, turning on and off, switching ports etc. but nothing seemed to work. Then after about 60 seconds a note pops up on my screen saying:
"OS X can't repair the disk Macintosh HD. You can still open or copy files on the disk, but you can't save changes to files on the disk. Back up the disk and reformat it as soon as you can"
I click 'OK' and the drive mounts but won't let me make any changes. There's a new folder called 'Damaged Files' that contains three jpegs- no big deal.

So, I think: Phew, this is why I use Raid. However, upon checking both drives independently, the same notice pops up. So two identical drives with two identical problems. It seems that whatever issue arose in one of the drives, it was copied to the other- great. Next I decide to take the computer's advice and copy everything over to another drive. I take one drive out, in case everything goes south, and I start transferring off the other which is set to take 6 hrs. I check in every now and then and everything seems fine, but after two hours the transfer stops and a 'so-and-so file can't be copied' notice pops up and the whole process shuts down. Now when I look in the 'damaged files' folder there are 60 or so- great. So I'm left with a partial transfer and more damaged files.

Next I switch out the drives and try Disc Utilities First Aid. The first try, it goes through a 5 min process that seems pretty thorough- and includes a segment which tries to find/repair damages files- but the process fails. I check my 'Damaged Files' folder and sure enough, now the same 60 or so damaged files are present as in the other drive. For fun, I try the First Aid again. This time, the process seems shorter and doesn't include and attempt to find/repair damaged files and the process succeeds and says the drive is ok.

This is where I'm at now. The damaged files have a right click option that lets you 'see the original' and some of these originals open and are fine. On the other hand, some files on the drive that aren't in the damaged files folder won't open. I've tried copying these files onto other drives and opening them from there but still no luck.

What happened to my drives? What do I do? Anyone, everyone please help if you can.

Thanks in advance!

 

[mrplow]

I'd suggest the enclosure, moreover the controller in the enclosure (the bit the manages the RAID setup/read write flow to the drives etc) is what's caused the issue (identical issues on both drives is the telltale).

What you need is a new enclosure or a sata connection kit and use that to connect one of the drives and try to recover your data.

 

[hhayden86]

I'd suggest the enclosure, moreover the controller in the enclosure (the bit the manages the RAID setup/read write flow to the drives etc) is what's caused the issue (identical issues on both drives is the telltale).

What you need is a new enclosure or a sata connection kit and use that to connect one of the drives and try to recover your data.

Thanks for your reply!

I took your advice and bought a new dock to test out the drives. There's still something very funny going on though.

I now have each drive separated; one is still in the original enclosure and one is in the new dock. But every time I turn each drive, regardless of which enclosure, I'm presented with a different scenario. I'll turn one on and an entire folder of images will have blank thumbnail icons and won't open (I'm a photographer so am mostly dealing with tifs, cr2 etc. opening in Photoshop) and the next time I turn on the drive all the files will have the proper thumbnail icons and open without issue. Photoshops response to a 'damaged (lost?)' file is: "Photoshop cannot open this file as it is not a TIF file". The last curveball is that sometimes files with blank thumbnail icons WILL open. Also, sometimes a file will open just fine from the hard drive, but if I try and copy it onto my desktop, it will show up there as a blank icon and not open (which makes the task of backing up files that appear to be in tact particularly volatile/daunting). I'm having real trouble seeing a pattern which makes it tough to isolate the issue. Both drives now mount without issue or delay and no one enclosure seems to be 'outperforming' the other. Both drives still seem equally temperamental regardless of which enclosure they're utilizing.

Would it make sense that- if it's as you say and my original enclosure's controller somehow confused my drives- that they'd still be acting this way, even in another enclosure? I just don't understand how the drives can 'lose' entire folders of files and then find them again arbitrarily. Can you see any way to fix this? Is my original enclosure garbage? If I do sort this all out, can I still trust it? If I reformat the drives after successfully backing them up (if possible), can I still trust them? Will a format wipe away whatever confusion is present?

Thanks in advance for any and all help.

 

[mrplow]

I'd say the original enclosure has made a mess of the catalogue/file allocation table etc. on both drives. It particularly sounds like it was having issues with the RAID setup (based on it's more consistent behaviour now it's a single drive in there). Sounds like you may have some corrupted files too. Any kind of corruption can give inconsistent results when reading the files

The best solution is to copy the contents of a drive to a safe, working location. Try the files in this new location. If they're behaving ok. Erase and format the source drive then copy the data back to it and try again.

If you don't have a suitable location to copy to you could try doing a repair on the drive from Disk Utility. This might fix a few issues.