Yes, it happened…again. I suffered from a “violent” power surge a couple weeks ago. It was not a normal surge or outage. The power went off and on very rapidly for a few seconds. The lights were flickering all crazy and I swear I heard some electrical crackling. We had two power outages that day. After the first two I ran over and shutoff my Mac and external hard drive.
Later that day when I turned the Mac on I noticed my external drive icons did not appear on my desktop. They were gone. WTF. After a few moments they eventually appeared. I have my external drive partitioned into two parts. The second partition loaded up fine, the first popped up with an error stating I could not write to the drive and that I needed to backup the data and reformat as soon as possible. Oh shit. I immediately opened both drives. They opened in Finder, OK all the data is still there. So I figured something happened obviously. I unmounted the drives and killed power to the external drive. I turned it back on hoping the drives would load, and they did not. Now I had the error on both drives. Fuck.
It’s a 1TB drive and all I have is a 256GB SSD on the Mac. Not even enough space to save all the data. Fuck fuck fuck. After a few days of constantly trying to get the drives to mount I gave up. I copied all the data I could. But after the second try of mounting the drives started coming up with files and folders missing. Oh shit did I lose my shit? I don’t think so. The drives were still reporting the correct usage and free space, so the data has to still be there. Right? After a week of scouring the net I came to the conclusion that the partitioning table got fucked up. I tried repairing it with the Mac but no luck. Soon as I tried the disks unmounted and never came back. Fuck again.
The drive was not working at all on the Mac or Windows. Lets try Ubuntu. Hey they don’t load but I can see the drives in /dev. I still couldn’t mount them, format them or play with the partitions. I tried loading GParted but it would just hang until the drive was unplugged. I let that bitch sit for hours. Believe me I gave everything I did a lot of time to do what it could. Nothing worked. I believe the drive is fucked. I had to go out and purchase another drive. I couldn’t go on any longer without an external drive. And I was getting disk full errors on my Mac. A trip to Fry’s Electronics fixed the no drive issue. Had to drop $100 though. I ended up getting a 3TB (upgrade!) external drive with enclosure. It was $10 more to get the drive+enclosure vs just a bare drive. So I went with caution in case the external drive enclosure was jacked (I don’t think so because I tried the drive with my Apricorn DriveWire) and got the enclosure too.
So I still have the drive, just like the last one that died on me. I am so fucking tired of losing data. Shit is gone that I will never be able to replace… Time to invest in cloud backup storage. 1TB of cloud storage at DropBox doesn’t sound too bad right now.
