Bizarre, Boris -- it does sound like a weird problem. What kind of external case is that?

I got a case from Other World Computing (OWC). It comes with a circuit board upon which you mount your HD. The whole assembly then slides into a translucent enclosure and you're set. The circuit board has two FW ports, an AC adapter port, and a power switch (to set whether you want FW power or AC power).

It's really a nice enclosure. I hope that wasn't the culprit.

Boris

You're right, the OWC enclosures are very good. Sometimes, though, drives will suck more power than the bus is able to supply, and you do need to attach the AC adapter: was that attached during this process?

I was only powering via FW.

I have a quircky FW port--I have to either put the PowerBook to sleep or restart, with the device plugged in, for the device to be recognized by the FW port (it does supply power right away, just not device recognition). It's even this way with my iPod. I've just grown accustomed to this weird behavior.

Also, after the clone was complete, I did a disk utility on the drives, and the disk image "Macintosh HD", on the external, was grayed out. I think the drive is bad. The S.M.A.R.T. didn't read failure, but couldn't read.

Now, I can't even mount the external drive.

Boris

Well, SMART status isn't available on external drives anyway, so that's not a big surprise. But -- you didn't indicate you were backing up to an "image"... were you? Or were you writing directly to the drive?

No, directly to the drive. I was just checking the disk utility on the image.

Boris

Weird. I wish I had an idea for you. I'd definitely try connecting the AC adapter to the case next time you give this a shot.

Boris

As Dave suggested to you, try to beg, borrow or steal an AC adapter and try it out. I had exact same problem as you, as far as the SD errors I was receiving. Unlike you, my setup had worked perfectly with SD and my external OWC Firewire case...until I increased the drive size from 40g/4200 rpm to 60g/7200 rpm. After much work with Dave, super helpful as usual, we found the power (bus) too little to run the drive successfully. Actually, it would run, apparently normally, but couldn't handle copies of larger files, either under SD or in the Finder.

Was particularly hard to diagnose as at one end of my day, SD & this drive copied fine (I used AC power there, work.) At home, with only bus power, didn't work.

Also, don't give up on the drive. Mine also got so fouled up it would not show up in Finder, etc. I would try to reformat it somehow, Disk Utility being first option, then try cloning with AC power. --Ted--

Ted's being far too kind, Boris -- "we" didn't figure out the AC problem, Ted did! It wasn't something I had considered, and I'm trying to make up for that here. ;)

Thanks Ted and Dave,

I'll give it a try this weekend.

Boris

Well guys, you were correct. The AC power was an issue with drive performance.

I have erased my now external with disk utility, over-writing with all zeros, and no mechanical flaws were detected. It took about 15 minutes.

I then used my now purchased copy of SD to do a non-bootable clone, and that took 26 minutes. I can see all of the files on the external, but the access time is somewhat long. The drive will still occassionally lapse into this tic tic tic mode in between normal hard drive access noises.

I'm going to use this drive for a while, and if any issues come up, I'll replace it.

Thanks,

Boris

15 minutes? Hm -- that's kind of short if you wrote zeros to both the data and free space. I'd expect it to take far, far longer... and the fact that there are tick-tick-tick noises -- depending on exactly what those are -- indicates that there might still be problems on the drive...

In any case, glad that attaching AC helped!