R-Studio for Mac crashes before scan finishes

[robermaldo]

I am trying out the Demo, but the scan does not finish, so I am hesitant whether this app can help me recover files from my external disk.
The disk is a Lacie Quadra D2 1TB, which I connect to my Intel MacBook Pro via an e-SATA Express Card. The disk is HFS+ with only one partition. It used to work just fine and then started showing problems by not mounting in OS X (10.4) sometimes, even though I could still access it via a Terminal shell by navigating to the /Volumes directory. It has stopped mounting altogether. I have tried connecting it with another power cable (the one from my 500GB Lacie NAS disk), and have also tried connecting it with the Firewire 800 and USB 2.0 cables. All connections produce the same result: OS X does not recognize the partition and offers to "Initialize..." it. The odd part is that the disk is being detected as SCSI when it is connected via e-SATA.

Anyway, R-Studio scans the first 150+GB, and then crashes, producing a dump file (see attached).

I would really like to buy R-Studio but if it is only going to crash, then it appears that it may not be worth buying.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Alt]

That looks lake it is a hardware problem with the disk or, more likely, with the controller card in the case. Can you see files/folders when you access it via the Terminal shell?
I'd rather take the disk out of the case and connect it directly to a computer, but I'm not sure with the warranty problems.
An the first thing I'd do is to make an image of the disk and work with it.

[robermaldo]

I am suspecting the enclosure's electronics as well. It's too strange that no matter which type of connection I use (USB, Firewire 400, Firewire 800, or eSATA), the interface is detected as SCSI.

I would like to make an image but I do not have a drive with enough space: it is the only 1TB disk I have. The closest other one is 500GB, with about 288GB free.

I may attempt to take the disk out of the enclosure. I bought it re-furbished over a year ago, so I don't think that it is still covered by warranty. Funny thing: one of the enclosure screw heads is almost totally worn out, almost as if the refurbisher wanted to make it really hard to open the enclosure.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[Alt]

I still recommend you to create an image of the disk. Maybe, you can borrow a disk from a friend for several days?

[robermaldo]

To make a disk image I would need a 1TB disk. I wish I had a friend with a totally empty 1TB hard disk! One friend has a 1TB Apple Time Machine, but more than half is already full.

I purchased a SATA-to-USB bridge cable. I opened the disk enclosure and disconnected the power and SATA data cable from the disk. I then connected the SATA-to-USB bridge cable and power cables directly to the disk, therefore bypassing all of the enclosure circuitry, including its power supply. The disk is then detected as a USB disk by Disk Utility. The disk EFS+ partition information is still not detected by the Macbook Pro, so OS X offers to initialize the disk.

In an attempt to see if a small region scan would detect files, I created a Region with a size of 5GB, starting at 100GB. R-Studio found some files, but all the files have generic names, so I don't know whether R-Studio could recover full files, so I am still hesitant to buy it.

I do understand that I may need more free space in my MacBook Pro to perform a full scan, because my MacBook's disk only has about 10GB of free space. I will try to save the scan file to another external disk I have, which has more than 200GB of free space.

R-Studio has consistently estimated that a full scan would take about 43 hours. I know that my 1TB disk had about 450GB of free space, so maybe I could cut the scan time in half by creating a 550GB Region. I just hope that R-Studio does not keep crashing when only 1/5th of scan is completed.

Any suggestions will be most welcome.

Have a pleasant day,

Roberto Maldonado

[Alt]

I don't understand why you started scan with a 100 GB offset. I'd rather have started from the zero offset. And try to preview found files.
More about file preview: http://www.unformat-unerase.com/Unformat_Help/index.html -> Data Recovery Using R-Studio -> Basic File Recovery -> Previewing Files.
Your found files are the Known File Types: http://www.unformat-unerase.com/Unformat_Help/index.html -> Data Recovery Using R-Studio -> Advanced Data Recovery -> Disk Scan -> Known File Types.

[robermaldo]

I started at the 100GB offset because I'm trying to recover a home movie, so I'm trying to determine where in the disk it is, and whether it is recoverable. The time estimate for a full scan is 43 hours and I'm afraid that scanning for that long would make things worse by overheating the disk. I've resorted to placing the disk on a laptop cooler (it has two fans) and running the scan while saving the scan results to a networked disk. I wish that R-Studio had a pause and resume scan feature!

Thank you for pointing out reading material that could help me understand these process better. I'll take a look at it.

[Alt]

R-Studio can scan an object in several successive scans. First, from 0 to 100 GB, second, from 100 GB to 200 GB, and so on. Most important, R-Studio accumulates the information from successive scans and keeps track of changes in this information obtained from different scans. See for more details: ttp://www.unformat-unerase.com/Unformat_Help/index.html -> Data Recovery Using R-Studio -> Advanced Data Recovery -> Disk Scan -> Multiple scans.
I recommend you to scan the first 100 GB to determine whether R-Studio can read the file table, and you'll be able to find the movie in the folders/files structure and recover it.

[robermaldo]

Okay, I will try that.

[robermaldo]

R-Studio found all the files (or the table that points to the files) when I tried your suggestion of scanning from 0 to 100 GB. It took just over 11 hours to scan about the first 46GB before I stopped the scan. I will probably run separate scans (with slightly overlapping regions) until the whole disk has been scanned. Thank you for your helpful suggestions.