[Mac Lover]

I own a 120 gig MacBook Pro, and I have a 300 gig external hard drive attached with around 65,000 pieces of music on it.

For the past few weeks while playing music, my external would just stop in the middle of a song. In order for it to continue, I could sometimes just lift the laptop and place it back down. Most times, I would have to quit and restart the external, however.

Last night the external stopped, iTunes switched the main library over to my internal HD iTunes library, and now I can't even get iTunes to recognize the external to play music.

I can still access other non music files on the external HD, but the computer can't find the external's music files.

I have already tried repairng disk permissions.

Is all my music gone?

[Luca]

Not necessarily. I had problems with an external case about a year ago where seemingly random songs would cause the external drive to get "stuck" and freeze the entire computer until I unplugged it or turned it off. I was very worried and thought I'd have to buy a new hard drive and try to transfer all my data across, because in many cases the computer wouldn't even recognize the drive after unplugging it and plugging it back in.

However, it turned out to just be a poorly-made external case. I bought a new case and it worked perfectly, and it's been working without problems ever since.

I'd try that first, before you panic. And make sure you get a high quality external case. Don't just get the cheapest one - I had great luck with a MacAlly brand USB2.0/Firewire combo case, which was around $40.

[Mac Lover]

Thanks for the input, Luca. My external is a Seagate. Is it wise to open the case and replace it with a new one?

NOW my computer won't even recognize the external. It says:

"This disk is not readable by this computer".

I didn't do anything different than I usually do.

Is that fixable?

I have bought a back-up Seagate. Is it time to replace the old one?

[Yonzie]

I have an IOMega MiniMax external drive/USB Hub/FW Hub.
It worked, until one day it died. Extracted the harddrive, put it in another box, worked fine.
I RMAed it and got a refurbished one, now if I connect it through USB, the fan just spins... FW fortunately works. Crappy POS.

You can safely take the drive out and put it in another box. If you are not experienced in handling electronics, just make sure not to touch any of the electronics directly

[Mac Lover]

Thanks, Yonzie. What is "RMAed"?

Sigh. I have no idea how to do it, but I'm sure I can feel my way thru it.

I need to purchase an enclosure, I guess.

I tried to verify and repair the external, but it won't complete the task. Disk Utility partially completes the process, stops, tells me the volume needs to be repaired, but won't allow me to repair it.

Is all my data lost?

I will go out and buy an enclosure tomorrow. Anywhere in particular I should shop?

[Yonzie]

When electronics break and you return it to the manufacturer to get it fixed, you must first get an Return Merchandize Authorization - RMA. I've just been in the business for too long

You don't know about your data until you have another enclosure to test with. Unless it made nasty noises though, there is a good chance your data is fine.
You need to take apart the existing one first, to find out if you have an IDE or SATA drive. Otherwise there's a 50% change you'll get the wrong enclosure.
SATA on top, IDE on the bottom:

[Luca]

You should still disassemble the case and check, but chances are it's an IDE hard drive. There aren't a whole lot of SATA cases around.

[Mac Lover]

Please don't get angry if I momentarily try to bypass your suggestion.

I have a 500 gb Seagate FreeAgent sitting right here, ready to transfer files.

Should I try to transfer files between the older Seagate and the newer one first, before I do anything as drastic as opening the case? If so, how do I do that?

It's very hard mentally committing myself to cracking open and breaking a case that holds all of my music. I'm fearful of damaging the HD in the process.

[Luca]

No worries. My suggestion was just that you shouldn't panic because there's a chance that the hard drive is fine and that the case is causing the problems. But it's still a good idea to back up that data just in case it's not the case that's causing these problems.

On the other hand, I don't know how you're going to transfer stuff over if you can't even get your computer to recognize your hard drive.

Also, opening the case shouldn't break it. External cases that you buy separately tend to be easier to open than ones that come with drives pre-installed, but they have to get the hard drive in somehow. Just get out a Phillips screwdriver and undo all the screws, and take the case apart. You should be able to put it back together.

If you're really confident, you could just try moving the problematic hard drive to the enclosure that's currently being used by the FreeAgent. Of course, that would involve disassembling both cases, but it might be worth a shot. If you do that, you'd also want to test out the hard drive from the FreeAgent in your old enclosure, to double-check if it's the enclosure that's causing problems.

I just wish I were there to help you out, because I've disassembled and reassembled hard drive enclosures more times than I can count, and it would only take me five minutes to switch the drives, test them out, and switch them back.

[Mac Lover]

Update: I tried using Disk Utility on my old iBook G4, and it repaired the HD a little more than my MBP (it said some keys were out of order), but still stopped short of completely repairing it. I googled my problem, and found that Tech Tool was a recommended disk repair program when Disk Utility fails, so I looked it up. Since it's only availble on OS 10.4 (the iBook only goes up to 10.3.9), I disconnected the external from the iBook, and connected it to the MBP, my only hope being that it's accessible when I downloaded Tech Tool.

To my utter shock it mounted! And the files were safe (I played some songs on iTunes, just to make sure)!

Before anything else changed, I quickly connected the Seagate FreeAgent, and now I'm backing up all my music before the original external poops out again.

Tomorrow I'm buying a back-up for my back-up. I do not want to go thru this again.

Thanks everyone for all your help!

[turtle]

Glad it worked for you! I wouldn't stress the troubled drive if you can help it though. At least, not until you've gotten all your data off of it.