external HD & Retrospect

Question

Level 2

262 points

external HD & Retrospect

All of a sudden I'm getting Error 105 when I try to backup my internal hard drive to an external HD using Retrospect 4.0. It had been working just fine for two years, but not now. Retrospect's dialog box reports that there is an unexpected end of data, and Retrospect's website indicates that means there is something wrong with the external HD. I have run Disk Utility several times. Half of the times Disk Utility finds alternating errors of Mount Errors and some sort of volume problem. (I'm not on that system now, so I don't have the specifics here.) Sometimes Disk Utility says that it cannot repair the disc; the rest of the time it says that it has repaired the disc. Disk Warrior finds some fragmentation, but not much--always under 16%, and it claims to be successful in every run on this disc.
This is my primary backup disc. The main, internal HD is running just fine, but I'd feel better if the backup did, too.
Any ideas?

Performa 6400, Mac OS 9.1.x

Posted on Jan 22, 2008 7:50 PM

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Answer 1

Limnos

Level 10

428,189 points

Jan 23, 2008 11:18 AM in response to R_55a

I'm a bit confused. Your computer information says you are running a PPC6400 OS 9.1 but you are talking about using Disk Utility which is an OS X application.

I can't find anything about an error 105 so maybe one of the gurus here has that information. The nice thing about having this happen to your backup drive is you do not have to worry about having to rescue the drive intact since all your data is on your main drive. If it were my drive and I had all my data on another drive then I might reformat the backup drive and copy all my main drive to it (not using Retrospect) just to see if the error persists. Initially I would scan the disk for bad sectors. Conceivably some problems could also arise if the electrical connections are bad so check your cables and connectors.

How old is the drive? Drives do not last forever, though I must say that out of the 20 or so I have owned I have only ever really had one die on me before retiring it.

Brian

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Answer 2

Jan 23, 2008 1:52 PM in response to R_55a

Richard,

If you have already indicated the city you are in, forgive me and post the location again. In the northwest, schools are now throwing out computers with 30 gig hard drives. Maybe we can find a user group in your area or a recycler that can offer you additional/replacement backup options. Even recyclers sell 4 gig drives for $5 now.

Jim

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Answer 3

R_55a Author

Level 2

262 points

Jan 23, 2008 7:27 PM in response to Limnos

You are correct. The utility that I used was Disk First Aid, not Disk Utility. That's the problem with jumping back and forth between machines.

I don't know how old the external drive is. I bought it used for $20. It's a Quantum Fireball ST 3.5 inch.

I have tried the simple matter of copying the contents of my most important partition directly onto the external drive, but the transfer quits after a hundred megabytes or so.

I kind of doubt any problem with the cables, because the icon for the drive appears normally on the desktop. And, aside from the one problem of trying to copy a massive folder between drives, I have no trouble transferring or opening files and folders on the external drive. Nor do I have any trouble in booting from the backup system that I have on the external.

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Answer 4

Limnos

Level 10

428,189 points

Jan 23, 2008 8:58 PM in response to R_55a

Did you try reformatting or at least scanning the drive for bad sectors? If I recall correctly, Drive Setup has a scanning feature.

From various things you have said I gather this is a SCSI drive. Have you tried moving it into the computer to see if it is truly the drive and not the enclosure? It's been a while since I last saw a Performa 6400 but usually you can fit two of any particular kind of drive in a desktop model.

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Answer 5

Feb 4, 2008 11:53 AM in response to R_55a

"aside from the one problem of trying to copy a massive folder between drives"

Finder in older systems did not have a large enough RAM allocation to handle large file transfers all at once. As for the drive issues, diagnosis is harder than simply working around the problem. Every thing you have indicated leads to sector issues that a reformat might cure. First Aid is not as sophisticated as Retrospect so I would not be surprised that it sees errors that First Aid does not see.

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Answer 6

R_55a Author

Level 2

262 points

Feb 7, 2008 7:13 PM in response to Limnos

You're going to love this one. As I thought about the problem, I got to wondering what SCSI setting I had on the external hard drive. Using some instructions for this particular drive that I found somewhere on the Web, I found that the external HD was set to zero. Just like the internal HD. Oops! I reset the external HD to something else, 2 or 3, and now Retrospect works on the external HD. What's odd, though, is that Retrospect worked fine with two zero-set HDs for a year or two, and I never did have any problem with transferring files back and forth between the drives. I'd heard SCSI was weird.

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Answer 7

Feb 11, 2008 3:54 PM in response to R_55a

Richard,

The stock internal hard drive on a 6400 is IDE, not SCSI.

See:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=112383

That drive ID 0 is not a SCSI ID.

If you have an internal SCSI HD, someone has customized the computer.

Jim

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Answer 8

R_55a Author

Level 2

262 points

Feb 14, 2008 7:31 PM in response to Appaloosa mac man

O.K. Maybe it is an IDE hard drive. It's been years since I've been inside in the drive bays.

Would having both hard drives set to zero make a difference then? Because, for the time being, Retrospect's problem has cleared up.

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Answer 9

Feb 18, 2008 12:38 PM in response to R_55a

IDE controllers do not link to SCSI controllers so the master slave or zero/one addresses do not relate in any way to the 0-7 or 0-15 address assignments for SCSI. I think you may have just had a software glitch that corrected itself.

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