external HD Help - self erasing?

[bones]

I have 2 external HD's, one is a Kaser Storage Vault which I have set aside for my time machine in Leopard. I plug it in now and again and get the flickering blue light but never really paid attention.

I also have a new Western Digital Mybook Premium (500GB) which I bought to store my daughters videos, music, files, etc.

So, last night I wanted to get some files off of the mybook which is plugged into my airport extreme router and everything on there had vanished. Absolutley no files whatsoever. Over 70gbs of my daughter's birth, first feed, photos, files, etc...gone. I was very distraught and very pissed off that my security device (as in backup) had failed. I tried the disk utility and some other things to try to get some informaiton back but to no avail.

LUCKILY when transferring files from my computer to the new WD mybook, I had run the time machine prior to the exchange and it looks as though I am going to be able to restore my files. BIG RELIEF and Time Machine now officially rules the school.

My question is, how does an external hard drive magically completely erase itself? It was plugged into a surge protector, insulated room, on a shelf away from the dog... Should I not be using the drive as a file server? Putting it in a ziplock? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

b.

[urban1]

This probably belongs in the computer help thread.

BUT Ive got the WD Mybook Premium 500GB as well. I bought it at Costco. I hooked it up installed the software and copied some photos onto the drive. The next time i started up the PC and went to access the drive it showed there was nothing on the drive. If I checked the properties of the drive it said 0 bytes of 0 bytes free. This alternated with it saying the drive not being formatted. Im not sure what happened. I wasnt worried about losing anything at this point. I formatted the drive. I still had the software but you can download it from the WD site if needed. The drive seems to work fine now but I get a "delayed write" error to that drive even though im not trying to write anything to it... it pops up in the tool bar at the bottom of my screen.

Not sure what Ill do. I bought it at costco not too long ago so I might return it outright or exchange it.

[bones]

Originally Posted by urban1

This probably belongs in the computer help thread.

BUT Ive got the WD Mybook Premium 500GB as well. I bought it at Costco. I hooked it up installed the software and copied some photos onto the drive. The next time i started up the PC and went to access the drive it showed there was nothing on the drive. If I checked the properties of the drive it said 0 bytes of 0 bytes free. This alternated with it saying the drive not being formatted. Im not sure what happened. I wasnt worried about losing anything at this point. I formatted the drive. I still had the software but you can download it from the WD site if needed. The drive seems to work fine now but I get a "delayed write" error to that drive even though im not trying to write anything to it... it pops up in the tool bar at the bottom of my screen.

Not sure what Ill do. I bought it at costco not too long ago so I might return it outright or exchange it.

I got mine at Costco as well. It held the information for a few weeks at least then all of sudden, last night everything vanished. Mine showed all but 45mb's was free. The pre-installed WD software was even missing. A spontaneous reformat....not sure if there's a problem with the drive? Scary though!

[sclitheroe]

Just out of curiousity, are you people who are losing data keeping the drives formatted as FAT32? This is most likely how they are formatted out of the box, and it's more error prone if the drive and/or computer is shut down improperly.

Try formatting them as NTFS (for Windows users) or HFS+ (Mac users), as both filesystems are a lot more robust.

-Scott

[bones]

thanks Scott,

I just reformatted and partitioned a small area of FAT32 and the other as indexed apple format (whatever it's called). Things seem to be copying better. I had the entire thing formatted to FAT32 before.

b.