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Time Machine EATS DRIVES!!

I've got an external USB-powered 320G iOmega drive on my wife's mini that's used for Time Machine that frequently disappears from the desktop, preventing TM from backing up. I'll unplug and replug the drive, and it appears again, and can be selected for TM, and all is well. The last drive I used for this suffered the same symptoms and eventually failed and could not be repaired.



Is there something that can prevent an external USB-powered drive from surviving a restart, or mysteriously get interrupted somehow? Or cause it to not be automatically restored to the desktop after that happens? Is there a way around this? I have my own TM setup which uses my TimeCapsule, so could another mac somehow get confused and forget a local USB drive to try to use a nearby TimeCapsule instead?



Anyone else have this problem or hear of it? Or have any suggestions?



TIA!!

Posted on May 22, 2011 7:24 PM

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3 replies

May 23, 2011 2:12 PM in response to g.Mark Stewart

Did you check your console log for errors? I had the same problem with an external USB drive intermittently disappearing from the desktop, causing Time Machine backup to fail. The console log reported Disk I/O errors. I repartitioned and formatted the drive, then re-initialized Time Machine. A month later the same thing happened, presumably when the Time Machine backup reached the same size.


My MacBook could not read SMART status from an external USB drive so I plugged it into my Windows laptop. I was surprised to find that the Windows Disk Management tools could manage drives with GUID Partition Table (GPT) partitions, although of course I could not view the content. I was able to view the SMART status, big problems with sector reallocation metrics. After failing to complete a surface scan (HDDScan) and a low-level format (LLFTool), I concluded the disk is trashed to the point sectors cannot be remapped. I doubt Time Machine could have caused this.

Time Machine EATS DRIVES!!

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