Today while removing my second optical drive something horible happened. I finished removing it and slid the optical drive carage back into place. I then booted my computer to be met with the smell of burning computer equipment, I quickly powered off the comp and opened it up.
The smell was coming from one of my hard drives. I pulled the optical drive carage out and examined it, everything seemed ok, then I noticed a strange kink in one of the 4 wires of power conectors for the optical drives. Unpon examination I saw that somehow the drive carage had pinched the wire cutting through the insolation and making contact with the live wire. Meaning that the entire aluminum case of my Mac Pro had power pumping through it.
Unfortinetly one of my 250 GB hard drives (the one with all my projects) got fried, it no longer spins up and I lost all my data (about 4 months of work since last backup and a number of things that were too large to backup to any of my other drives). All thanks to bad engenering on apples drive carage. So beware when you are adding or removing optical drives from your Mac Pro’s. Jeff
P.S. Yes it douse seem like I’m having more than my share of bad luck lately.
I was gonna say that…at least it was only one hard drive and not the motherboard or something. That sucks though. I have to say, I’m quite paranoid about backing up my in-progress stuff every day. I would really hate to lose even one day’s work, never mind 4 months…ouch!
Guategeek, I know it’s very sore right now, but I just want to encourage others to learn from this. The whole possible defect in the design of the G5 is good to note and look out for, but there’s a bigger issue here.
Back when I was working on hand drawn computer animation for film school I had a PowerMac 7500 and opted for the 500MB hard drive to save some $ (max was 1 GB.) Soon, I was using 135MB SyQuest EZ Drives and the worst removable storage media ever created, Iomega Jaz Drive cartridges. Cost $150 a disk for ONE GB and every single one of them eventually got corrupted beyond repair. I got through the project on a wing and a prayer, but I lost work here and there, and ultimately the originals are mostly gone.
Moral of the story. Things are much better now, but a hard drive can go bad at ANY time, so it’s actually the exact same situation I had back then. Maybe the odds are better, but it doesn’t make it less painful when it happens to you. If you have something important to you on computer media right now, it better be on more than one device or you will eventually be hurting badly.
Two hard drives is probably the easiest/fastest way to go (Or 4 or whatever, just double up.) It may cost $$$ but it’s easy to foresee that you’d pay anything to get your work back.
Yah backing stuff up offten is verry important. I just need to bite the bullet and purchase more drive’s so I can actualy back up everything every day or two. Well I guess its time for me to make some cool new stuff from scratch talk to you all latter. Jeff
P.S. There are only 2 kinds of people in this world, those who have had hard drive crashes and those that will. So be prepared
YAY! You aren’t totally discouraged by lost work. Once I get past the pissed phase of loosing something, I usually feel better about things because I can start on something new using all the things I learned on what I lost. It’s like starting on a new, blank sheet of paper after several times trying to draw an aazing piece of work.
I feel your pain. I’ve had two hard drives die in the last two years, and the first one took four months of work with it, as well. There’s nothing as horrifying as that smell of burning chemicals.
Hey Jeff-Sorry to hear about how things are…Not good at all…
Sometimes its good to clear the decks…i hope you can see it like that…
Ive got a 40gb hd that appears and dissappears from the desktop, so Maybe just stick yr drive back in (give it a loving tap?) and one day it will reappear? I was glad when mine did, I hope yours does too.
AC
I’d imagine that, while the drive controller may have been fried, the data on the disk is probably still intact. Maybe you can get a data recovery company to extract your data from the disk.
one hint if you ever need to go the data recovery route - when you get your drive inpection and estimate back act very shocked but be nice about it. apologize say you’ll have to find something cheaper.
i got a $2500 job (which i really could not have paid) knocked down to $1200. i think this can happen because by the time they’ve inspected it to see what files they can recover most of the work is done already (that’s why some charge high inspection fees - mine was only $100 though).
i used to backup monthly - now its weekly with random folder backups daily if i’m busy. it sucks but once you’ve had an important drive fail you tend to get neurotic ; )
Just to share: I once lost 2 YEARS work of short films because I failed to screw in a hard drive into its external enclosure. When someone picked up the enclosure the hard drive fell out and landed on the floor.
That is awful, Jeff, especially given it appears to be a design flaw. I certainly empathize having lost a HD --I had a similar experience about 2 years ago and only had a backup that was about a month old.
Since then I use SuperDuper to clone my main HD to an internal backup HD every night (only copying new/modified files) and then also do a monthly backup to an external. The nice thing about the nightly is that it kicks off at 3am and I never have to worry about it.
The whole possible defect in the design of the G5 is good to note and look out for, but there’s a bigger issue here.
talk to you all latter. Jeff
