Death of an HD - suggestions?

[barondave]

grump grump grump

For the first time, I had a working hard drive die on me. Perhaps I've been lucky, but I've never had a major issue with my drives, from the SCSI era on.

Until this week.

And, naturally, it's the most recent drive I bought. The terabyte drive I got last year because it was cool to have a terabyte drive, and they got cheap enough.

Fortunately, nothing was completely lost. I got it to put all my CDs into iTunes, and I still have the CDs. (Though some large number of them are not in CDDB and I had to hand-input the info.) I have very few mp3s/downloads that aren't stored anywhere else, and all the important files (such as podcasts) are in other places as well.

Also, I was using for backup; it was my Time Travel repository. I've lost the backups and the history, but everything's working. My original is my backup to the backup.

On the other hand, setting up iTunes again will be a pain. I had thousands of songs, many of them with ratings and comments. Many playlists and categories. And it means I can't plug in my iPod or do interviews, since the data will just erase. (I can eventually download my iPod songs into iTunes...)

My fingers are still crossed that I can recover the data. If it were important, I could. But it would probably cost more than the original prices of the drive and of the replacement. I may just eat the time and play with all my CDs again.

I'm more-or-less resigned to replacement and the work, but I LJ has a lot of techies. Suggestions of something to try? I've used Disk Utility and TechTool 5, and the thing doesn't even show up in the listings.

grump grump grump

Comments

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

No suggestions on the HD if you can't get it to show in Disk Utility.

But for getting your songs from the iPod onto your computer, there's a shareware program out there called Senuti (iTunes spelled backwards...) that can reverse the usual flow and allow you to dump songs off an iPod and onto the computer. That might save you some of your trouble, depending on how much of your collection is on that iPod.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

None of the songs on the iPod are irreplaceable. What I'd have to do is remake all the aacs and figure out which songs I had deleted after listening once or twice. I think I can do that fairly easily with a "use iPod as disk" preference, or something.

Most of the songs in iTunes are in several formats. If I reloaded all the songs, I'd lose that part of it (plus any editing I did).

I suspect the big loser will be Marscon, since my playlists and even some Shockwave CDs were fully loaded. I'd have to recreate them, or use Toast, or something else.

It's been four years; almost time to think about getting a new computer... but that would require income...

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Several years ago I purchased a utility called Fixit in an attempt to recover some pictures from an ailing hard drive. It not only worked perfectly, I've continued to use it as my anti-virus program ever since. It's a surprisingly powerful set of tools for about $50. I don't know if it works with Macs, however.

[thaedeus.livejournal.com]

this is an internal sata drive in your machine?
or is it an external firewire / USB drive?

if it is external, maybe the drive itself still works,
but something went wrong with the power supply or hardware
in the external unit.

does it spin up? double checked all cable connections and
looked for bent pins or other obvious things?

yeah, I have never lost data on my 3 Macs either. Yet.
but it gets harder and harder to backup recordings as
they add up quickly (in my case Logic Audio tracks)

Good luck!
Z

[barondave.livejournal.com]

External USB. It spins up, but sometimes makes a non-standard sound. It's off at the moment, hoping that a cool-down will fix things, but I fear the worst.

[(Anonymous)]

This may be of interest to you:
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/copying-music-from-ipod-to-computer/P1

I used the "Brute-force" method at the end of the article. Only lost the file names (maybe playlists too, can't remember). All the tags were OK. If you're going to try it, I suggest giving it a go for a few files first and seeing what the results and time-lengths are ... not just doing all thousands of songs from the start.

-P (through http://alces2.livejournal.com/ )

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I have a lot of music (and some pictures) on the iPod, but the main thing I'm worried about is transferring voice memos (interviews I do with an attached mic) without erasing the music files. Again, this won't really be a problem until Marscon.

[(Anonymous)]

The "without erasing ..." is why I liked that method. The iPOD just looks like an external drive device and it's accessed through Explorer, not through iTunes. Copy files from that external device onto your hard drive.

Just work with a new (or different) iTunes library and you won't delete anything from your existing library. Load from your hard drive into the new iTunes library.

Once you've got all (and only the) files you want to keep in the new library, it's pretty simple to bring them into your original/main iTunes library.

-P

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

By a staggering coincidence, I just had a computer die also. It was the Toshiba Satellite with Windows XP Home that I had been using to synch with iTunes (since my desktop is a much older machine with Windows 98, believe it or not), to take notes for lasfs minutes when I was Scribe last year, etc. (I just replaced it with a Dell Inspiron 1525 from that manufacturer's Outlet store and saved a few hundred dollars over a brand-new one.) I think the motherboard blew out, but there seem to have been some problems with the hard drive as well. I pulled off all the documents and the few dozen photos I kept on it, without any problem, but I wasn't willing to trust it with the integrity of all my music files.

Fortunately, I had a good number of music files on an external HD, since the Satellite could only hold 60GB to my iPod's 80GB (actually 74). But I looked around and found a program called CopyTrans, which let me pull everything back off the iPod and load it directly into iTunes again. It cost $20 and has more than paid for itself in time saved. I believe there is a Mac version in addition to the PC one I used. You might consider this, because all of the tags and other metadata in the files will be reconstructed. (This was important to me because Gracenote, formerly CDDB, is not very friendly with classical music, and I had to do a lot of customizing to make it even marginally useful.)

I have no connection with the makers of the software, other than being a very satisfied customer. My iTunes library is fully loaded again as of last night, and the next daunting task is going to be reintroducing my iPod and iPhone to the new computer. Fortunately I took some use-it-or-lose-it vacation time, so I have the next three days to spread this out and do it right.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

Oh, and apparently CopyTrans will also recreate your playlists and ratings. The only thing it won't do is smart playlists, I think.