So, my external FW-IDE drive seems to be getting more and more unreliable, but I'm thinking it's the interface in the enclosure and not the drive itself. I tried moving it's entirety back to my internal drive and got I/O errors and a no go. Now moving it to another external USB drive and it's taking about 3 hours - not a good indication. So now, should I get another external enclosure to test, or should I just pony up the $ for a larger internal SATA 2.5" drive? The enclosure is a much cheaper solution at the moment. Of course, having to get the 2.5" drive would preclude my being able to afford an iPhone. Crap!

What is the food chain for the Hds? Internal plus the external extra for extra storage with both backed up elsewhere or something?



If it's not the enclosure though you'll end up with a deprecating IDE enclosure. As you know IDE is fading out, and the drives are much smaller for the price.


This is a handy and inexpensive item to have in the tool kit. It does 2.5 and 3.5 IDE and SATA drives. You just have a drive laying out bare without any clothes so it's not a permanent solution, but it is a handy testing tool.

I/O errors are usually the drive in my travels, but I haven't traveled everywhere.

Dude.. lay off the eggnog....

???

The external FW/IDE was my boot drive while the internal was/is my emergency boot drive with DW and TTPro installed. The USB external contains my TM volume on one partition and, now my boot volume on another. I'll try cloning the boot volume to the internal (doesn't leave much elbow room on that drive, though) later. Waking problems were getting to be more frequent from the IDE drive, and yesterday I couldn't boot from it until I cycled the power on it. That's when I decided to move the boot volume to a known reliable drive. I guess I shoulda grabbed that 250Gb internal when it was $50 instead of the $95 it is now.

That looks like a handy tool to have, anyway. I might order the Vantec model since it's the same price and I've grown to trust Vantec's quality.

I can move (clone) my Lion, main volume, between the two external drives, but not to my internal. It gives me an I/O error every time. I can, however, clone my emergency volume (10.6.8) to any drive including the internal. I'm now attempting to restore from my Time Machine volume to the internal, but it has been "estimating time remaining" for an hour now. I've been using the Restore function in Disk Utility, which usually works flawlessly. I think I may give Carbon Copy Cloner a spin if this doesn't work in getting my primary boot volume back onto my internal drive.

Heh! That didn't work. I canceled the restore process and it rendered my primary system useless (I wasn't booted from it). Shrug.

Since I had my emergency boot volume on two drives, I upgraded the OS to Lion on the original FW drive that I was suspicious of (no problems booting or copying to and from) and am now using Migration Assistant to restore from my TM backup. It seems to be restoring the correct amount of data, so I'll see how this goes. Thank goodness for TM! (I hope that's not premature, though)

Strange stuff indeed. If the current migration works, but you still get the I/O or wake from sleep errors, you might try wiping the internal, make it one partition. Then do an erase on it and check write zeroes one pass in Security Options to see if it's the internal that is failing. It may write out bad blocks if that is what is going on with the internal.

Maybe the partitioning is just corrupt on the internal too. I take it DW says both partitions on the internal are okay?

The internal wasn't partitioned and was zeroed. Just now getting the restored volume sorted out.