"unformatted" Drive Error? Lost Footage?

[Steve Speers]

I am on a job and we shot all morning on the RED drive. Everything ran great. Footage played back in camera was a fine. No problems. The drive was taken to be down loaded and the tech said it would not mount. Had to reboot his computer a number of times. The computer was powering the two back up drive and the RED drive off the Mac bus power which was powered by an inverter in a mini van. (is this okay way to power all this?) Since it didn't mount the drive was put back on the camera to check and on the lower left of the LCD is said "unformatted". What does this mean? He was still unable to get the footage off the drive. When I asked to go AC power and try the firewire 400 the drive mounted and there was one file. A log type file. What does all this mean? Is the footage retrievable? Gone? What do you suggest? Once it was mount the cpmpacity of the drive said 5.5mb but the tech as early said it showed around 30gb used.

Confused and unsure of what has happen. The entire time we were shooting the camera was in 3K, 2:1, Time Base 23.98, various frame rates.

I appreciate any help you can give me. Thanks. Right now I think the drive is going to RED.

Steve

 

[Jean Déraps]

Did you properly dismount the drive from the camera using the menu option (or shortcut)?

 

[lonny dill]

Last night, we ran into the same problem. We shot 17 clips. At the end of the night, we reviewed the last clip and everything looked great. We powered down the red camera and removed the drive. Our editor took the drive and headed to the edit suite to back up the drive. We sent most of the crew home and started to dismantle the set. About 1/2 later, our editor phoned and said the drive was not being recognized by two different computers. Whaaaaa? He said he tried both firewire and the usb ports, but all produced the same result. We took the same red camera to the studio and connected the drive to the camera, but the display now read unformatted drive with a big X. We tried unplugging and plugging in the drive several times to see if it would redetect properly, but; after many attempts we gave up.
I called red this morning and they offered to attempt a data recovery at no charge. I hope this works, but we will probably shoot the same set tonight again. We can't take a chance, we are shooting outdoors and weather may be getting worse soon.

 

[Irri]

I've shot stuff and have the drive not mount on the camera or a computer. We had a drive that didn't mount, then eventually mounted and everything was there. I think there can be a problem with the RAID array mounting which is different to actual loss of data.

 

[Sam Roberts]

In my experience with SCSI arrays it is often the case that just the drive info gets corrupted but not the actual files. The computer give you false info like telling you an empty drive is full or a full drive is empty or will refuse to recognize the drive at all.

A data recovery service will give you a report on the status of the files for a couple of hundred bucks...more if you then decide to retrieve the files if the drive is heavily damaged or corrupted.

 

[Cüneyt Kaya]

How old are the drives?
thanks

 

[lonny dill]

We sent our drive off to a forensic lab for data recovery using a FRED machine. It looks like the Red drives are raid array 0 with two 160gb drives in one 320gb housing using a bridge circuit to create the raid. One of the two drives went bad. Only a few files were recovered and none of the R3D files could be recovered. In the case of a raid array 0, if one drive goes bad usually all is lost. 4K Red probably requires the raid array 0, as it allows for faster data storage rates. On the day we were shooting, we took 3 power drops which totally killed the camera while in record mode. We had to re-power up all 3 times. These drops could have been the cause for the drive failure. We will probably start lugging around a UPS in the future.

 

[Alex Carr]

Someone possibly improperly transported the drive... I've had a drive fall 4 inches and it never worked again... Luckily I got the footage first. They are very fragile pieces of equipment,

The same rules apply to Hard Drives as they do to lenses,

 

[Dan Hudgins]

One shot at a time?

One shot at a time?

It might be best to take the drive off the camera after each shot and download the data to make sure that you have the data before you move on?

 

[Steve Sherrick]

This thread is actually a great reminder to future clients that on-set data management with any of the file based cameras is essential. I am sorry to hear about the experiences that Steve and Lonny had. I'm sure circumstances prevented them from being able to do checksum backups while on set, but I see potential for this happening more as people decide to pass on data management and just back up when they get to the edit suite. They'll take the risk due to time constraints and budget cuts. The thing to keep in mind though is that you could potentially lose your whole day's footage which will cost you possibly more than having a person doing your backups.

 

[Jeff Brown]

I totally agree with Steve.

At this point shooting data is all about correct management and backup. This is not defending the fact that the drives went down but acknowledging that this can happen. Never fill the drives beyond 10 percent and always back up and check on the fly.

For me the drives are purely a stop gap for long record times untill we get the 16gig cards / flash rams.

Regards

Jeff Brown
RED 708

 

[lonny dill]

Data recovery with Red Drives

Data recovery with Red Drives

It is essential to just lug a laptop around and do your drive backup right there on location. We now pull a mag about every 20 minutes and start a copy. I recommend that everyone do the same. TRUST ME. I wouldn't want anyone to experience the headache or stress of attempting a data recovery. It was a waste of time and nearly caused an embolism.

 

[Deanan]

If you're having a problem with a corrupt or formatted filesystem on the disk, it's a good idea contact red about recovery first.