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Red drive failure - help please

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Tim Naylor

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I'm in the middle of a feature and shooting to 16 gig cards (I've little trust for the drive after a previous debacle). That said, because of some extremely long takes, we went to drive a few times. And sure enough in the middle of a drive dump, my tech gets a "Improper Device Removal" warning on the MPB (or similar warning). The computer was running off battery back (APC 400 watt) up power. The drive off bus power. There were no apparent power breaks. We're dumping to two G techs via 800 through an MPB.

When we restart the computer nothing mounts. The drive does show up in the disc utility as well as in displaying and playing clips in the camera. But will not mount on a computer (tried 3 different lap tops - 2 MPB's and a Macbook).

Does anyone out there have any answers on how to fix this? If your answer is "Red Undead", please direct me to some lucid instructions (Tough find).
 
Tim Naylor said:
I'm in the middle of a feature and shooting to 16 gig cards (I've little trust for the drive after a previous debacle). That said, because of some extremely long takes, we went to drive a few times. And sure enough in the middle of a drive dump, my tech gets a "Improper Device Removal" warning on the MPB (or similar warning). The computer was running off battery back (APC 400 watt) up power. The drive off bus power. There were no apparent power breaks. We're dumping to two G techs via 800 through an MPB.

When we restart the computer nothing mounts. The drive does show up in the disc utility as well as in displaying and playing clips in the camera. But will not mount on a computer (tried 3 different lap tops - 2 MPB's and a Macbook).

Does anyone out there have any answers on how to fix this? If your answer is "Red Undead", please direct me to some lucid instructions (Tough find).
Click to expand...

Did you try mounting the drive off of USB or Firewire 400? If not, try that first and see if that works if that doesn't work try this; from Jeff Kilgroe,

in the terminal type redundead and see what it says.

If you are not savvy with the unix command line or your terminal window, here's a quick and dirty tutorial on redundead, I'll have you list the disks twice so you know for sure which one you're looking for...

Don't connect your RED media just yet. You first need to figure out where you're going to put the recovered files. Make sure you have enough space to hold all the potentially recovered files. Create a folder in a place you can easily navigate to. For this example, I'm going to assume you will connect an external disk to your system named "SATAdisk" and you will presumably connect your RED media by firewire or USB or whatever.

Go ahead and connect that SATAdisk and create a folder called REDfiles.

Open terminal and type: diskutil list

This will list all the storage devices attached to your system and their size.

Connect your RED media to be recovered (CF, RED DRIVE, RED RAM). And type again: diskutil list

You should be able to identifiy the RED media. It will probably be named 'disk1' or 'disk2', etc.. We'll assume the RED media comes up as 'disk2'.

OK, now you're ready to run REDUNDEAD. You need to execute the program and give it the source, followed by the destination for the recovered files. So we type:

redundead /dev/rdisk2 /volumes/SATAdisk/REDfiles/

It will start working away... and will tell you when it's done.

Notice that even though the RED media will be named 'disk1' or similar, you will specify it with an "r" in front of the name in the source line. Notice above it's 'rdisk2'.

If you have any other questions feel free to PM me. I'll help you out.
 
mikeburton said:
Open terminal and type: diskutil list

This will list all the storage devices attached to your system and their size.

Connect your RED media to be recovered (CF, RED DRIVE, RED RAM). And type again: diskutil list

You should be able to identifiy the RED media. It will probably be named 'disk1' or 'disk2', etc.. We'll assume the RED media comes up as 'disk2'.
Click to expand...

You can skip this command line stuff by opening up the "Disk Utility" program, click on the Red Drive, then click on "Info". The information you are looking for is "Disk Identifier". It will be something like "disk3" or "disk3s2"

mikeburton said:
redundead /dev/rdisk2 /volumes/SATAdisk/REDfiles/
Click to expand...

The command line is very unforgiving about capitalization and punctuation. For instance, in the above, "volumes" is spelled wrong, it should be "Volumes"

But the far easier way to list the destination directory is in FINDER to navigate to the folder you want to save the files to and then click and drag the folder to the terminal. It will automatically give the file path to that folder, including spelling correctly and backslashes as appropriate. Just make sure there is a space between the source disk and the first slash "/" of the destination.

For the original issue, perhaps you shouldnt be using bus power? I almost never do, unless its a dire situation. I dont know the backstory, but Id recommend against it in the future.
 
(just my opinion:)

Never ever ever ever run a Red Drive off bus power with the Firewire 800 port (or any other port AFAIK). Way too many people have blown the port by doing this. Always use the AC power supply.

The other ports should still work though; that's the nice thing about Red Drives.

If you're in the boonies, you can run a power inverter off a car battery, and then I like to use a smaller UPS in-line to keep it honest.

Lastly, I know they aren't cheap, but ET's Red Drive shock mounts are the cat's meow; I won't shoot to Red Drives without 'em.

Good luck!

Matthew Verkler
 
I'd like to echo what Matthew says above.

I used to occasionally have a drive spontaneously dismount when running on bus power (G-Raid mini). Also if the data cable gets wiggled, (e-sata is particularly volatile in this regard) you can also get a spontaneous dismount.

Run off the power adapter, tape down the cables.

I never had a a drive misbehave in this manner if I follow those two rules.

My $.02

Steve
 
Hello Tim,

This exact problem happened to me on a recent shoot when I was unmounting
a Red drive from a G-tech G-safe drive. Same Finder error message and both drives disappeared from the desktop. The Firewire ports on both the G-tech and the Red drive were blown out. The USB2 connector remained working on both units. The G-tech is out getting repaired. I'm buying an R2E Esata cable for the Red drive.

I can't verify this but I have heard that the chances of blowing out ports increase a bit when daisy chaining the drives. This is a FW800 issue.

Try to access the data from the USB2 port. If that's blown as well you can always get the R2E Lemo to Esata cable for the Red Drive.

http://www.coolcameragear.com/cables-c-1.html

They have a good deal with R3D manager which helps with more peace 'o' mind.

Brian Timmons
britim media
 
Out of interest, and please pardon my ignorance, but what do you need to do to use the Esata Lemo cable? Do you need to buy an adapter or is there an appropriate port on an up to date Macbrook pro?
 
Running bus power WHILE daisy-chaining Firewire 800 is guaranteed to mess up everything in the chain. Certainly one of the deadly sins!

On the other hand, I've daisy-chained Firewire 800 drives (up to 7 drives at a time) for ages without any difficulty, because they all were running off their own separate power.

I run bus power on USB drives all the time (obviously), and have some older Firewire 400 drives that I use bus power on. I never connect more drives onto a drive that is running bus power; I sometimes will put a bus-powered drive on the end of a chain, but it's not good practice as most drives aren't up to supplying power to subsequent drives. And maybe I'm superstitious, but I always connect my Red Drives directly into the computer, no matter what interface I'm using.

Matthew Verkler
 
Last edited:
Stephen Lovett said:
Run off the power adapter, tape down the cables.
Click to expand...

Cables can be a problem when using a laptop on a cart or table with other devices close by.

As a precaution, once a transfer has begun, try not to disturb the computer.

For security wait until transfer is complete for start showing downloaded clips, just one slight move can unlodge your FW cable causing you possible problems.

Also if you are renting RED drives, I've found some rental houses, leave out the power cable for the RED drives, make sure you have them.

One other note, the new 15" MBP do not have express slot, only the 17"
 
Andrew clemson said:
Out of interest, and please pardon my ignorance, but what do you need to do to use the Esata Lemo cable? Do you need to buy an adapter or is there an appropriate port on an up to date Macbrook pro?
Click to expand...

Hi Andrew,

Sadly none of the MacBook Pro's have a native e-sata interface, so you will have to have a MacBook pro with an expresscard 34 slot.

If you do a search on expresscard or esata I'm sure you will find plenty of threads discussing the topic.

I use the Tempo Sata Pro from Sonnet, and it's worked really well for me.

There are cheaper cards, but the whole point was to increase the speed of data transfer, and the Sonnet was the fastest card I found.

All the best,

Steve
 
Verko said:
(just my opinion:)

Never ever ever ever run a Red Drive off bus power with the Firewire 800 port (or any other port AFAIK). Way too many people have blown the port by doing this. Always use the AC power supply.

The other ports should still work though; that's the nice thing about Red Drives.

If you're in the boonies, you can run a power inverter off a car battery, and then I like to use a smaller UPS in-line to keep it honest.

Lastly, I know they aren't cheap, but ET's Red Drive shock mounts are the cat's meow; I won't shoot to Red Drives without 'em.

Good luck!

Matthew Verkler
Click to expand...
Hi, Matthew!
Have just ordered my R1, planning on recording almost only to the Red Drive because of the longer recording time (nature, documentaries). Blown FW ports doesn't sound fun right now. As AC power supply isn't common in the woods, what would you, or anyone else, suggest instead? Can the Red Drive take power directly from the batteries? Suppose not? By the way, do you know if it's pssoble to record to another external FW drive, Lacie Rugged for example?
_________________________
Ulf @ OneHouse
 
Hi Ulf,

Like I said, a car battery with power inverter to get AC, running then through a small UPS, has worked for me. A beefy fully charged UPS would work too, provided it had enough power to last long enough for the full transfer.

I suppose someone could figure out another way to power the Red Drive from other kinds of batteries, but I only know the above method.
I have three 320GB Red Drives and seven 8GB CF cards, so that usually more than covers my needs while out and about before seeing real power. If I can get to my vehicle, then I can use an power inverter and there's no problem.

The good news for you is that you will receive the 640GB Red Drive, even if you ordered the 320. Look for Jim or Jarred's post on that. If you really need to squeeze more record time out, shooting in 3K actually looks really good and cuts well with 4K if exposed well. 2K's not the end of the world either and your record time goes way up.

I really recommend Element Technica's shock mounts for the Red Drives, even when shooting on a tripod. That gives you quick on/off capability, and many locations have vibrations that can get up to the drives through the tripod. We've done handheld all day for many days shooting to Red Drives without dropping any frames.

BTW Ulf, you're going to love the image you get with your Red. There's no turning back!

Matthew Verkler
 
Thanks, Matthew!

Sounds hopefull! Now I'm only a bit worried about the "turbulence" in the Birger Mount-posts... I'm expecting my Birger Canon Mount to show up any day now and hope it works fine "manually" without the Impero – which seems still a bit "under construction". But I beleave it'l be a Great accessory when it's ready!

/Ulf
 
Thanks for all the insights everyone. Being in the middle of a feature - no time right now to deal with this. I need to find someone in NYC who can diagnose, repair and recover. Any recommendations? Background: We were running FW 800, AC power. We tried all other ports except lemo to esata. Drive shows up on camera and can playback / record clips. Shows up in disc utilities under 400 or 800. Just no disc image.

2nd failure for me on the job and based on the responses, I'm not alone. 1st failure, lost 40 gigs - much worse, a mechanical issue. This seems fully recoverable. But I after this experience, I'm done with the drive.
 
help!

help!

With regards to the REDUNDEAD tutorial that was posted up, i seem to be having some major problems! I followed the instructions exactly and typed out the command line word for word, following capitalization and punctuation closely but it keeps telling me there is no such drive or directory! any one having similar problems?

My recovery drive is a 1tb raid drive listed as "disk1s2" on the disk utility info page. on the terminal it's listed as "disk1",

i followed Conrad's instructions and created a folder on a separate drive named "REDfiles". my command line is as follows.

REDundead/dev/rdisk1s2/Volumes/DRIVE\ 5/REDfiles

*the output folder was dragged directly into terminal

Need some help please! We are a rental house and a client of ours had their harddisk crash with 2 days of footage so we are trying our best to salvage what we can for them. The footage was only erased off the drive recently. (it was just moved to thrash then emptied, not formatted).

Juan Qi An
Data Wrangler
BERT LIGHTING HOUSE
Singapore
 
Juan Qi An said:
My recovery drive is a 1tb raid drive listed as "disk1s2" on the disk utility info page. on the terminal it's listed as "disk1",

REDundead/dev/rdisk1s2/Volumes/DRIVE\ 5/REDfiles
Click to expand...

try this. note the spaces:
REDundead /dev/rdisk1 /Volumes/DRIVE\ 5/REDfiles

Please make sure that you're 100% sure that the destination drive is not the drive you're trying to recover from. We've had a few support call about people doing that.
 
Tim Naylor said:
Thanks for all the insights everyone. Being in the middle of a feature - no time right now to deal with this. I need to find someone in NYC who can diagnose, repair and recover. Any recommendations? Background: We were running FW 800, AC power. We tried all other ports except lemo to esata. Drive shows up on camera and can playback / record clips. Shows up in disc utilities under 400 or 800. Just no disc image.

2nd failure for me on the job and based on the responses, I'm not alone. 1st failure, lost 40 gigs - much worse, a mechanical issue. This seems fully recoverable. But I after this experience, I'm done with the drive.
Click to expand...

I'd recommend either talking it to OffHollywood or contacting RED support and sending it back to us.
 
Juan Qi An said:
With regards to the REDUNDEAD tutorial that was posted up, i seem to be having some major problems! I followed the instructions exactly and typed out the command line word for word, following capitalization and punctuation closely but it keeps telling me there is no such drive or directory! any one having similar problems?

My recovery drive is a 1tb raid drive listed as "disk1s2" on the disk utility info page. on the terminal it's listed as "disk1",

i followed Conrad's instructions and created a folder on a separate drive named "REDfiles". my command line is as follows.

REDundead/dev/rdisk1s2/Volumes/DRIVE\ 5/REDfiles

*the output folder was dragged directly into terminal

Need some help please! We are a rental house and a client of ours had their harddisk crash with 2 days of footage so we are trying our best to salvage what we can for them. The footage was only erased off the drive recently. (it was just moved to thrash then emptied, not formatted).

Juan Qi An
Data Wrangler
BERT LIGHTING HOUSE
Singapore
Click to expand...

Hi Juan, called your office. no one answer. Let me know if I can help - Lim
 
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