I took the hard drive out and plugged into an enclosure and it shows up as two items;
An AWS swap and AWS swapconfiguration. I click on it and it doesnt show anything.
Perhaps its format is different than a normal one.
Can anyone give me advice on how to read the files so I can save some of them?
Thanks,
Skip
MBP 15 , Mac OS X (10.7.1), plus IOS on iPhone 4S
The Gen3 mostly work much better than Gen1 Gen2
Gen3 is identical board to the Gen4 btw .. just a different wireless card and antennas.
If the power supply is a Delta.. opaque type plastic not the black flextronics one, then the power supply is also pretty good. They do have issues of course.. and once they go past 3years I think the reliability is not so great.
Gen3 tend to die suddenly as they short out the board due to bad ceramic capacitors or the ethernet stops working.. same reason.
What hard disk did it have? Some used Samsung Spinpoint and some used WD green? Both of which might have gone bad.. they are cheap consumer drives.. not "server grade" as Apple likes to pretend.
I think a new 2TB green drive even the WD is so cheap it is well worth the upgrade. I have put 3TB drives in them and they have worked fine. If it shorts out the board.. just pull the drive and buy another box to put the drive in.
But you can run the TC as a Gen4 Airport Extreme.. works fine.
Jay Miller3 wrote:
Was your initial problem that the Time Capsule would sometimes work and sometimes not? Mine sometimes appears in Airport Utility and sometimes just goes away.
Does the TC act as both, a router and as a hard drive? I ask this because, even when the TC goes away and appears to be off-line, my wi-fi network, throughout the house, is still functioning.
JM
That problem might just be the Lion/Mountain Lion bug.. it simply cannot remember where it put down the TC.. and cannot find it to pick it up again.. a simple reboot gets it going again. ML has a number of fairly poor networking bugs.. exacerbated btw with a TC. It is almost worth thinking around the issue for the moment.. ie use an external drive plugged into the computer for backup rather than TC.. due to very poor ability to keep TC network disk on the radar. Just too many issues also with TM.. it might be worth thinking more broadly on that one as well.
Thank you for your thoughts.
You've also put into perspective the use of the TC and TM and their inherent limitations.
Thanks,
Jay M
This has been one of the best forum discussions with lots of very worthwhile information. I am so glad I started it and so glad some great people chimed in. I would like to know where I can find a good information source on the different hard drives and their reliability. I saw the one comment about WD, caviar grade etc. It would be great if someone can recommend a site so we can see the reliaiblity by brand and grade.
I am also glad the one guy could pull back the rubber with no problem. I absolutey tore mine apart but I admit I wasn't that diligent with the heat source as I knew the device was "kaput'.... but my hard drive was ok...
Skip
LaPastenague wrote:
The Gen3 mostly work much better than Gen1 Gen2
Gen3 is identical board to the Gen4 btw .. just a different wireless card and antennas.
If the power supply is a Delta.. opaque type plastic not the black flextronics one, then the power supply is also pretty good. They do have issues of course.. and once they go past 3years I think the reliability is not so great.
Gen3 tend to die suddenly as they short out the board due to bad ceramic capacitors or the ethernet stops working.. same reason.
What hard disk did it have? Some used Samsung Spinpoint and some used WD green? Both of which might have gone bad.. they are cheap consumer drives.. not "server grade" as Apple likes to pretend.
I think a new 2TB green drive even the WD is so cheap it is well worth the upgrade. I have put 3TB drives in them and they have worked fine. If it shorts out the board.. just pull the drive and buy another box to put the drive in.
But you can run the TC as a Gen4 Airport Extreme.. works fine.
It had the Samsung Spinpoint.
Just to be clear: everything preceding the last sentence "But you can run..."--all the stuff about shorted boards and the power supply and capacitors, etc.--is in reference to using the TC with a new drive inserted, yes? Because that last sentence says to me I needn't worry about all that stuff if it's just a "castrated," if you will, TC with no drive at all?
Because it's now all put back together and I didn't know to determine the type of power supply it had and it would be great not to have to worry about it dying suddenly. I do have this unopened Netgear router that I bought as a backup in this process and I'd love to send it back to Amazon if I can rest assured that the neutered TC will keep functioning.
So can I not hook up an exterior HD to the USB port on the TC to use as a TM drive? (tho it sounds from the above that you're generally not a TM fan. I'm not either really. Never was comfortable with the fact that you had to tell it what NOT to back up rather than what TO back up. I think that's dumb. But my wife likes the automatic nature of it)
OT,
I have another thought or question to ask, please. When the Time Capsule (TC) goes, as SKip said "Kaput," I'm still receiving a wi-fi connection clearly. I believe the TC acts as both, hard drive and router. So, what goes "kaput" may be the hard drive part of the TC leaving the router part alone. Am I thinking correctly about that? Here's what the Airport Utility looks like at time of "kaputting." Thanks, Skip for starting the discussion.
Dear Brunettin,
I actually hook up an external hard drive to that USB port and it works fine. It is accessible by every computer on my network at home- I have 4. The hard drive I use is a Guardian Maximus dual enclosure (two drives) that I have set up as a RAID 1. (both drives are identical so if one crashes, I replace it and the other good drive copies all the material over to the new one- this way, I have two identical backups- that was the problem and concern I had with the one drive in the TC). I have been doing that for years and it works fine.
To show you how anal I am about this, I actually have three drives. One is stored offsite in my safety deposit box.
Every month, I pull out one of the mirrored drives in the guardian maximus and place in the safety deposit box. I then take that drive and put into the maximus so it is mirrored to the other drive.
I assume your castrated TC should recognize a hard drive in the USB port. Try it and see.
skip
Jay,
Like any other computer, the TC has a number of components feeding and controlling wireless, connected ethernet cables, an internal hard drive, and a USB port for external drive/printer. The board controlling all this can break in one place, two place, three or more so there is not an easy answer. Mine started acting squirrely in all areas and then just went "kaput" on all. I brought it down to the genius, he tried several things and said its "broke" dont waste time unless you want to go in and start troubleshooting alot of different things- thats way beyond me and my capability or desire to learn. So I bought a new TC and broke open the old one to see if I could remove the hard drive to get some files I randomely place on it... more curiousity than anything else...Hope this makes sense...
Yes, it makes sense. Before you broke it open, were you able to get any of the backups off it, and if so, how did you go about that process?
Or, I suppose, that if only backups are on the TC, then there's really no need to get anything off it, as long as the primary computer is still working at the time the TC "kaputs."
My TC keeps coming onto line and then going off line.
My Time Capsule "went Kaput" but I "think" the Hard Drive is ok.
