jgcorn
asked on
Mac OS X -- External FW hard drive .jpg files no longer recognized
I have a frustrating, intermittent problem. I have an iMac G5 2.0 mHz machine running Tiger 10.4.5, with an external FireWire drive. I have a large number of photo files stored on the external drive. For weeks, everything was fine, I could access the files as needed. Now several of the folders, when I open them. have only vanilla generic .jpeg icons rather than the thumbnail, and if I try and open them I'm told it may be corrupt, or may be in a format Preview cannot recognize. But some of the other photos, in the same folder even, do just fine. I can't help but think some type of cache file is corrupt -- but which one? How do I fix it? I've tried unmounting and remounting my FW drive, no luck. Also, sometimes, inexplicably, everything shows back up again and works fine. The same thing happened when I ran this drive off my eMac. What am I doing wromg?
Can you see the photo's correctly if you copy them off your drive? How does Apple's Disk Utility report the drive when it scans it? Do you have any Antivirus on your Mac? Norton on the Mac can cause some screwy bugs like this.
It sounds like the external drives connector may be damaged if the problem is intermitten. The best solution would be to wait till its working and quickly copy them all off to your local G5's hard disk. Then if the drive is still under warranty you can send it in for repairs, if not you may be SOL and have to buy a new drive.
Have you tried upgrading to OS X 10.4.6 to see if the problem still occurs then?
It sounds like the external drives connector may be damaged if the problem is intermitten. The best solution would be to wait till its working and quickly copy them all off to your local G5's hard disk. Then if the drive is still under warranty you can send it in for repairs, if not you may be SOL and have to buy a new drive.
Have you tried upgrading to OS X 10.4.6 to see if the problem still occurs then?
ASKER
Well, Disk Repair, etc. didn't help. I tried MainMenu and did everything it offered but it didn't work. I tried copying the photos to my G5's main hard drive but it still says they're damaged. I don't have Norton Antivirus. I just bought Disk Warrior (been meaning to for a while), I'll try that next...thanks, everyone, for their help so far.
Let us know if Disk Warrior fixes the problem, if not we can talk about other ways to recover the data (providing the drive hasn't failed entirely and cooked all of it.
ASKER
Well, Disk Warrior didn't work either -- but now it tells me the file is not recognized much more quickly:)
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ASKER
Thank you VERY MUCH! This was the solution I needed. Got all my files back using File Restore. I still don't know why or how the files became corrupted, but at least I can get 'em back.
run apple disk utility in applications/utilities over the drive
faling that try:
Download from versiontracker.com or macupdate.com one of the several maintenance utilities such as Panther Cache Cleaner, TinkerTool System, Onyx, CocktailPE, Control Freak, Yasu, etc.
Use the utility to run the system maintenance scripts, clear caches, etc.
Shut the computer down for a few minutes, then restart.
alternitivly coppy the files off the drive re-format it and coppy them back