I so wish I had found this blog during my last 10 days of my Disk warrior episodes. Reading all your stories I have sympathy for all your hardrive pain’s over the years I hope your problems were solved.

Is this page still active ?? 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 can not 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 can 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

Kind regards

Speed reduced by disk malfunction : 6,887.

Is there hope for me?

I want to cry…….

Tried DataRescue all over yesterday, as well as all night long. Seemed to work very fine, detected the drive and so on. But, while it actually found 41,600 nodes by quick scanning, it has been stuck on the 17,336th pretty quickly, maybe 5 minutes after being run. This morning, ie after 1day 1night of calculus, it was only at the 17,776th node. Considering that four hundred nodes had been scanned in about a day and a night, and considering over 22,000 were left, this was leading us to 55 days of hard work to come: almost 8 weeks. I actually chose to give it up for the moment, and to try out other softwares later. Indeed, i just managed to bring back my PB to life by plugging an external Firewire drive to it, i want to take a bit the most of it. He died 3 months ago, i didn’t want to bother myself with 2 months more without any laptop.

Anyway, i’ll be posting news about my case over here, if there’s anything changed positively. Thanks again Jim, and keep up the good work!

It’s been 4 days that DW is stuck on Step 5, with 1,103 disk malfunction errors. And it’s just so slow. Reading Jade’s previous comment, now i’m just hoping it’s not too late trying DataRescue. Thanks for telling about your experience. Keeping you guys up with my case.

Config: Powerbook G4, running on Firewire hard drive, 60gb. Trying to recover data from the PB’s original 80gb disk.