carlo@eagle.cvs.rochester.edu (Carlo Tiana) (08/27/90)
Hi folks. I have a serious problem with my LaCie Hard drive - a 200 Mb Maxtor mechanism. It's been running superbly for about 9 months, and tonight it just decided to die on me. My Mac (a IIci) was up and running just fine, until I tried to create a new folder. The Mac-wristwatch "wait" icon came on for about 5 seconds (usually an instantaneous operation, of course) and then said "cannot create folder - Disk error". Previously today, closing a window (with the close box) also took a very long time (again, maybe 5 seconds for something that's usually instantaneous). I have done nothing between trying to close that window and trying to create the new folder. I tried another couple of times to create the folder with the same result, and then tried "Restart". I had 2 applications open (Kaleidagraph and Word) and the machine hung trying to quit out of Kaleidagraph. I assume Kaleidagraph tried to do a little housekeeping involving disk access). I hit the "hard reboot" button and the mac could not find the hard disk (blinking question mark on the floppy icon). I then booted off my Silverlining (version 5.18) disk (which which the drive was formatted), and ran Silverlining. Usually, on startup, Silverlining finds the drive right away, and points to it by default. It did not this time. Instead, I had to ask it to search for drives, after which it came up with a "SCSI Device" on SCSI ID 0. I told it to use that device for a drive (it ought to have known it was a drive by now!), and finally recognized it as a 0 (zero, nil) Mb LaCie Drive. The simple "drive consistency" (or whatever LaCie calls them) tests failed with the errors "No sectors allocated for testing". Of course, if it thinks the drive is 0 Mb, it can't allocate any sectors for testing, I suppose. Needless to say, the read/write tests are useless: It takes Silverlining a negligible fraction of a second to do a full read/write pass - given the drive is only 0 Meg! I will call LaCie ASAP, but thought I would see if anyone had any non-data-destructive ideas in the meantime. I am more likely to be near a usenet connection than a telephone :-) ! Thanks in advance for any and all help. Carlo. carlo@cvs.rochester.edu -- carlo@cvs.rochester.edu