The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

ok gang:

let's say - hypothetically - you were running osx 10.3.9 with on a dual 1.25 g4 with 1.25gb of ram, two external hard drives and an external dvd burner. and let's say on one drive, where you save all your non-video work, you have a folder with several scanned images (all done on the same day) and two of these images in the same folder are corrupted (on the same day) after you're gone for a week of vacation.

they not only don't process when you try to copy or edit them, but quark either locks up or just plain refuses to print the page they're laid out on. so you erase them, rescan the images and that's that.

right?

well, my question is this - what are the chances that two images in the same folder would get corrupted and it's merely a software quirk/error/misfortune? should i be worried about the integrity of this external drive? i was going to clone it to my other drive (140 and 500gb respectively) and then format the 140 and start over (is there a mac equivalent of a low level format?)

is this wise? foolish? am i missing something obvious?

edit: the two corrupted images were both less than 4mb, uncompressed tif files, and on several occassions caused a system level lockup that could not be unbegotten outside of a hard restart.
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[silentmatt]

OK - off the bat, if you are in fear that it is the HDD itself, there are two steps you should take.

First off - use a program called "Data Rescue II" which searches the drive and tries to restore all the files to another drive. This program is pretty extensive - it canl restore like 14 copies of deleted items if there are slight changes in each. The goal of this program is to successfully restore your files and bring back any of the lost integrity. I have had HDDs with huge corrupted areas and I only lost like 1% of the data using this program.

The second step (after everything is backed up) is to format (using built-in Disk Utility and selecting a 1-pass security option) and work on the drive itself using a program called "DiskWarrior". The goal of this program is NOT to restore/save your data but to actually fix bad sectors of the drive - which is why you should run Data Rescue first. If you run this, then format, then run it again - in a kind of loop - it will fix almost any error on the HDD or at least give you a heads up about possible problems for the future.

If you need access to either of those programs, I can invite you into some private bit-torrent communities, just pm your e-mail to me.
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