| External disk failures
Although I bought my Mac Pro in fall of '06, I resisted using it for photo editing work. Instead, I continued to use my PC, while the Mac was used for video editing, my music hobby, and managing my MP3 library.
When Leopard was released, I bought it, and soon installed a new hard drive in the Mac Pro, on which I loaded XP Pro using Boot Camp. Since loading XP on the Mac, I have begun using that machine as my primary computer; I now do all my photo editing on the XP partition of the Mac, as the hardware spec of the Mac suggests the performance should be well above that of my (also) two-year-old HP desktop.
Part of my move included installing a 3-port Firewire card in the Mac and bringing over my external WD hard drives. All of the drives have both USB 2.0 and Firewire 400, and I have always used the Firewire interfaces on these drives.
Shortly after beginning to use the drives (on the XP partition) on the Mac, I experienced serious and sudden volume corruption on two of the three external drives. In essence, entire directories went "missing". They had most definitely not been deleted, but something caused the directories to become "invisible".
I was able to rescue SOME of the files using third-party disk/file recovery software, but some of the files were left corrupt and unusable. Needless to say, this experience has left me very wary. I am having trouble imagining that TWO of these drives, which had been bulletproof on the HP hardware, would have the same issues at approximately the same time (after being moved to the new machine).
I wonder if accessing the contents of the (Windows-formatted) drives while running Leopard might have caused my problems?
Can anyone provide any thoughts about why entire directories went missing, and why the data was corrupted?
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