Corrupt External Drive & Reinstall

I recently had to junk an external hard drive I was using to run iTunes and store my mp3s. Recovering the music wasn't an issue as I had it backed up in another location, but I can't un-install or re-install iTunes without the former drive pludded into the usb port! I recieve the error messages:
"Error 1237. Invalid Drive F:\"
and
"Error 1603 Fatal Error During Installation"
What next???

That’s what I was afraid of….
Usually, programs are installed to the primary drive (C:) in Windows systems. It appears that the uninstaller is trying to access a drive that is not there and fatally failing to complete.
Any way to attach the old drive just for the uninstall? Or set up another drive to be viewed as F: in its place?
Other than that, it may need some registry editing to remove the software. That's beyond me. I will try to recruit a more learned mind to assist.

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Corrupt external drive

I came back to my computer last night to find it wouldn't come out of sleep mode.
When I force rebooted it, it hung before getting to the Apple logo, turns out the problem was with my external drive acting as a time machine.
I'm all back up and running, however when I plugged in my drive it said it couldn't initialise it. After several hours of trying to get it to work I decided to give up and wipe it. I wiped it but it failed at the last block.
Now I can't get it to be detected by my Mac at all. Tried plugging it into a Windows PC which recognises it, but fails to mount it due to drive incompatibilities
Any suggestions?

Erase the external disk in the PC. Open Disk Management, right-click the partition of the external disk at the bottom and select Format. You must erase it in exFAT or FAT32

IMac repeatedly corrupting external drive directories in sleep mode

When putting my iMac into sleep mode or when it goes into sleep mode after a period of inuse I keep getting the "improper eject" message. After waking the iMac I sometimes get the "disc not initialized" message and discover that the directory has been lost. It's happened to 4 different external drives in the space of a month.
The disks are connected via firewire 800. I have recently added a firewire hub but the problem was happening prior to and post this addition. I can't think of any other changes I've made to my set up that may be causing this behaviour. Previously I've had no problems of this nature in the 2 years since I purchased the iMac.
The drives run without this problem when connected to my MacBookPro.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggextions for running any diagnostic tests I coulod run?
Thanks in advance.

I have the same issue on my 2011 MBP. I have three FW800 drives daisy chained together. The first drive in the series disconnects when my computer goes to sleep and I get the error stating the drive wasn't dismounted properly. The other two drives stay connected fine. I don't have to close the lid, it will do this after the computer goes to sleep based on my power saving settings.
The drive that disconnects is a 500GB G-Drive. The second drive is a 1 TB Hitachi drive mounted in a IcyDock. The third drive is a 500GB G-Mini Drive.
I had the same three drives connected to my previous 2007 MBP and never had the issue. The issue started when I purchased my new MBP in July. My software is up to date and I'm use OS X Lion.

My Macbook won't start, and I must reinstall the disk. I haven't used time machine to back up, and I want to use an external drive to back up now. How can i do this from the utilities page?

I am currently in Zambia on missions work and my computer is constantly exposed to heat. I have just been trying to avoid using it during the hottest part of the day. Today though, I started it up and it was stuck on the grey page with the rotating circle for over an hour, then once the circle left, it remained frozen on the gray page. I used command + r at startup to go to the utilities page to analyze the disk. It found that there were problems with the disk, but then it could not fix those problems and told me to backup as much information as I could and reinstall or redo it all. I haven't ever used time machine to back up any of my information, but i have an external drive that I can use right now to backup my files. I can't get into my computer though to backup the files. How can I use this external drive to backup my files while the computer is currently messed up? Please help.

Emergency Backups (Data Recovery)
A)          Format an external disk:
          (This will erase all data on the external disk.)
          Boot in recovery mode (power then Command-R).
                    Alternative: Network recovery boot (power then Command-Option-R keys)
          To format (and erase) the destination recovery disk:
          Plug in the drive you are about to erase.
          Select the volume that is NOT your system disk.
          Click on Partition.
          Pull down under Partition Layout to 1 Partition.
          Click on Options…
          Select GUID Partition Table.
          Name: Emergency Backup (or whatever you prefer)
          Format: Select Mac OS Extended (journaled)
          Click Apply.
          Click Partition.
B)          Try to boot in Safe Mode (power then Shift key).
          (This will be a slow boot. Be patient.)
          If it won’t boot in Safe Mode, jump to C.
          If it boots in Safe Mode, try to boot in normal mode.
                    If that fixed your problem then start a Time Machine backup.
                    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
                    https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4055
          If not, boot in Safe Mode again.
          Go > Computer.
          Double click on the system disk.
          Drag the Users folder to the recovery disk.
C)          To clone the disk:
          Boot in recovery mode.
          Select Disk Utility.
          Try to repair the system disk twice.
          Whether or not the repair succeeds:
          Drag and drop the system disk to Source:
          Drag an drop Emergency Backup to Destination:
          (Take care not to reverse this order.)
          Click Restore (the lower Restore button).
Once your system is healthy, maintain two reasonably current backups. (Time machine restores can fail.)
Create either two Time Machine backups (good) or one or more Time Machine backup(s) and one or more bootable-clone backup(s) (better).
          Use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to create bootable-clone recovery disks.
          See https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3045
          and https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031

My Mac crashed. I got a new hard drive. I reinstalled Lightroom. Fortunately ircats are stored on an external drive. How do I import all of the old catalogues from external drive into a new LR catalogue. I have done it before. It has just been many years

My Mac crashed. I got a new hard drive. I reinstalled Lightroom. Fortunately ircats are stored on an external drive. How do I import all of the old catalogues from external drive into a new LR catalogue. I have done it before. It has just been many years and I can't recall how.

If you had stored your catalog files on an external drive, then all you have to do is double-click on them to open them and use them.
Or you could move them to the internal drive and double-click on them once the move is completed.
To create a single catalog file from multiple ones, you could use File->Import from Another Catalog

HT1369 Ipod touch not being recognized by itunes (but is registering as an external drive by the computer itself) have updated and reinstalled itunes, stopped/started apple mobile device and removed and mobile programs associated with my non apple cellpho

Ipod touch not being recognized by itunes (but is registering as an external drive by the computer itself) have updated and reinstalled itunes, stopped/started apple mobile device and removed any mobile programs associated with my non apple cellphone. This seems to have started happening after the last Itunes update I did as I was able to put music on my ipod touch a month or so ago. Is there some way to go back to an older version of itunes? I really have no idea what else to do since I followed every step on the trouble shooting page for windows 8.

I had this problem too and my roommate solved it!
Go to 'Settings'
'Music'
Scroll to the bottom and enter your password to log onto your home sharing
Then connect to iTunes and sync!

Reinstall of OS: iTunes Library on external drive not recognized

I've always had my iTunes library on my external drive. Now that I reinstalled my OS iTunes will not open the library. I've navigated to the correct library using the advanced preferences but that's not doing it. I've tried discarding the existing library in the music folder. Can't seem to find the answer.
Thanks

JS,
I had some trouble following macmenno's instructions, but have had almost complete success. If you DO have your original itunes library file, this should work for you too.
Background, my situation:
My harddisk was failing but warned me, so i copied the ENTIRE itunes folder to an external drive. The iTunes folder includes the "itunes library" file, the music folder, and the xml file. This was suggested in a book i have on iLife as the best way to backup itunes to an external HD to preserve playlists, et al. But the book failed to say how to copy the folder back if needed.
So the first time i naively just copied the entire folder back to the imac (new HD) but itunes failed to "find" it, even though it was exactly where i had deleted the equivalent default (empty) files/folder. Playing around i managed to get itunes to find the music but not the playlists and ratings...i.e., it was not finding the library file.
Macmenno's instructions:
I started all over: With Itunes closed, I deleted all three items from the itunes folder: the library file, music folder, xml file. to be safe, i also emptied the trash since itunes seemed to be following the files. But i left the itunes folder in place, albiet empty. Per macmenno's instructions, i then copied ONLY the itunes library file and the xml file from my external HD to the imac itunes folder. I then opened itunes, checked the preferences to be sure it was pointing in the right direction. I then dragged the Music Folder from the ext-HD and dropped it on the library icon in the itunes program window.
That worked. i have my playlists, ratings, comments, et all.
Only problem is i now have duplicate listings of all music songs -- one with an exclamation point that doesn't play (apparently came from my itunes library file before i dropped in the songs), one that does play.
So macmenna, if you are still with us, how can i delete the 3,000 song titles with exclamation points? I tried to click on the column head to sort them all together, then block-mark and delete... but apparently we can not sort on that column head.
Or did i miss something in your instructions?
Thanks. and good luck to you JS.
SB
imac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.7) itunes 6.0.5

JPEG Corruption post transfer over USB External Drive (usb2.0)

Hello
I have two external drives, both support firewire400/800 and USB2.
On the firewire 400 settings no issue at all.
Previously on PPC powerbook, I used firewire 800 and no issues at all.
While waiting for my expresscard34-firewire800 to arrive this week, I am using the USB2 port on the macbook pro to trasnfer a jpeg library (c24gb) to and from, using either the internal 7200rpm sata drive on the machine, or also from the connected firewire 400 lacie 1tb bigger disc.
Whichever solution I use to copy from, all JPEG's that go via the USB2 port on the macbook, any usb2.0 port, get corrupted. I can open in aperture/bridge, or even testing in vista beta or xp and the files are corrupt. But if I transfer via the firewire 400, all is fine.
I can switch around the external drives, I have deleted all partitions and reformatted, and even gone through both fat32/osx-journaled options to no avail. Weird or what?
My only thinking option here is to create a .dmg 24gb file of the whole folder, and move that across, but that is just daft.
P.s. transferring any other type of data works perfectly fine, e.g. .mp3/.doc.xls etc.
Any thoughts on this weird one.
thks in advance!
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Hello,
The iMac G4 17" 1GHz only has USB1.1 so it doesn't matter that the MyBook is USB2.0 you'll only transfer at USB1.1 speeds (1.5MBps). As there is no way to add USB2.0 to the iMac G4 ≤1GHz you need to look at a Firewire drive like the MyBook Pro/Premium; incidentally, both of these come with back-up software too.
The iMac G4 can't boot from USB so if your internal drive fails you can't boot the iMac like you could on a Firewire drive.
Personally I do have my MyBook Pro partitioned in to a back-up space which matches my internal hard drive and a separate media file partition.
BTW you have posted in the Intel iMac forum. The users here will be less familiar with the specific issues that iMac (Flat Panel)s may suffer. I'd advise that you post future queries in the iMac G4 forum:
G4 (aka Flat Panel): Intel:
Click image to go to correct forum
regards
mrtotes

Hard drive died... How do I reinstall Mountain Lion onto an external drive?

I have Time Machine and two extra external drives but now I cannot boot from the Hard Drive to reinstall Mountain Lion. I have a recovery partition from TechTool but it does not include Time Machine or the App Store. My computer boots into the TechTool disk but my hard drive is not shown. Disk Utility does not see my hard drive either.
Any suggestions?
TIA

Sorry, I'm confused.
The recovery partition from Tech Tool, this is on the internal HD or on a CD/DVD?
Is this the same thing as the TechTool disk that your computer can boot into?
Where is the Disk Utility that cannot see your hard drive? Is it on the Apple recovery partition on your internal drive? Are you saying that Disk Utility on your Apple recovery partition cannot see your boot partition?
It sounds like your internal boot partition won't work, but the internal drive itself is OK (i.e., Disk Utility, on your Apple recovery partition, doesn't see the normal boot partition), or at least OK to the extent that the Apple Recovery partition can run.
If you install Mountain Lion on your external drive and use it as the boot drive for your computer, it will be very slow, and you won't be happy. I'd forget that idea.
Assuming I am thinking correctly about your situation, I would try to repair your HD. Your options would be:
a safe boot Mac OS X: What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? and then disk utility
boot into single user mode and see if you can repair your hard drive Repair Your Hard Disk in Single User Mode | Everything Macintosh
internet recovery OS X: About OS X Recovery
recovery disk assisant, if you have made one already OS X Recovery Disk Assistant v1.0
If none of that works, then I'd try and wipe the entire drive and start over. I'd try to do that from internet recovery. Hopefully one of your external drives has backups on it.
If that doesn't work, then I'd replace the drive.

Hello.... I already loaded logic 9 on my laptop hard drive... I would to load all the samples and loops on an external drive... Do I need to reinstall from DVD's or can I drag and drop?

Hello.... I already loaded logic 9 on my laptop hard drive... I would to load all the samples and loops on an external drive... Do I need to reinstall from DVD's or can I drag and drop?

Thank you.... Would you know where they would be on my hard dive? Are they all together?

HT4527 While upgrading my operating system to Windows 7, I backed up everything on external drive. However the drive is corrupt and lost my music. Since I have an iPhone I had the music there as well, I synced it and it erased everything. How can I get

While upgrading to Windows 7, I backed up everything on a external drive; it became corrupt so I could not access my music library for iTunes. However, I had my music on my iPhone as well so I assumed it will sync. It did sync but not the way I thought, so I lost years of music and favorite uploaded CDs. How can I recover it? I lknow you can acess iTunes from 4 computers so the database is there somewhere. Unfortunately all I was able to recover is the music purchased from iTunes directly. It makes me wonder about the iCloud product; if I cannot find my music what is my incentive to buy iCloud? It seems like they are starting to charge for something that they provided before freely, then messed up the updates and software so that we need to pay for this service now.

iCloud never stored music. That is what the iTunes Match service is for.
The only way to get back non-iTunes-purchased music is to import them to your new iTunes library however you did it on your old computer.

Time Machine corrupting external USB hard drives

In February I installed two Mac Minis running 10.8 Server. Each machine had an external hard drive connected to it.
Sometime over the Labor Day weekend, both drives stopped working. When I came in Tuesday, each machine had a message on the screen that the Time Machine drive had been improperly ejected. I powered down both drives and then powered them back up. Here's what is going on with each machine:
MACHINE #1:
Has a Western Digital 1TB drive formatted as OS X Extended Journaled.
Disk Utility is able to see the external drive; however, whenever I try to back up, I get the message "Time Machine couldn't complete the backup... Files can't be copied onto the backup disk because it appears to be read-only."
In Disk Utility, if I select the partition and Verify Disk, I get the message "Disk Utility stopped verifying Backup. Couldn't unmount disk."
When I try to reformat the drive, I get the message "Disk Erase failed. Disk Erase failed with the error: Couldn't unmount disk."
The Time Machine System Preference pane shows "None" for both oldest and latest backup times; however, I am able to enter Time Machine and see files going back to April.
MACHINE #2
Has a Segate 2TB drive formatted as OX X Extended Journaled.
Initially Disk Utility would recognize this drive about 50% of the time. I would power it down and back up. Sometimes it would appear in Disk Utility, sometimes it wouldn't. Whenever I would try to verify or repair this disk, it would immediately unmount and I would get the message that the disk was not ejected properly. When I try to backup using Time Machine, TM acts like it is preparing to back up and then the disk disappears from Disk Utility and from the Desktop and I get the message that The disk was not ejected properly.
This machine showed it was last backed up on September 1.
After fiddling with it, I was able to format the drive. After formatting the drive, I started a Time Machine backup and the drive unmounted again.
It seems that some event over the weekend caused both drives to corrupt. There was no sign of a power-outtage. Can anyone suggest how I can track down what caused this? Would there have been a maintenance script that would have run on Sept 1 that could have messed both drives up? Some other system event? Losing the data isn't a big deal. I just want to make sure I prevent whatever caused this in the future. Any tips would be much appreciated.

Yeah, I don't know much about the logs. I flipped through some using Console but didn't really know what I was looking for. I was hopeing to see an event that was followed by a notice that the USB drives had been improperly ejected since that was a message I received on both machines.
Since both machines were affected at the same time it seems logical it would be a scheduled event or, as you suggested, some power issue.

Opied files got corrupted in USB3 external drives connected to Macbook Pro, how to fix it?

I use USB3 connected external hard drives in my Macbook Pro mid 2012 (Yosemite 10.10.1) frequently. I had no problem until two months ago. This week I noticed a lot of corrupted files in one ext drive connected to USB3 port. Luckily I have a backup, and I copied back the files. But the files copied recently were also corrupted even though source files are fine. I spent a whole day trying to fix it using different methods of copy and options, e.g. erasing the drive, using cp, rsync, ditto and a combination of their options. I figured out that if I use cp or cp - R for copying single file or folder, it works fine, but using of rsync, ditto or recursive cp or finder's drag and drop result into a lot of corrupted files in the target drive. This is not the problem of external drive. I was surprised to notice that all files are copied perfectly when I used a old macbook (2008 model, it only has USB2 port, and OSX Mavericks). Since I have almost 2TB data to write, USB2 is very slow. I want to use USB3 of Macbook Pro 2012, but I am very disappointed to find out that USB3 in Yosemite is causing the trouble, writing out corrupted files. If anyone has a solution to this problem, or a second thought, Please suggest.
External hard drive Western Digital My passport.
Disk is formatted to Paragon NTFS

My guess here is there is some issue with the use of Paragon NTFS. Perhaps updating it or using another NTFS driver (like Tuxera, or its free alternative NTFS-3G) will work. All in all, using NTFS in write mode with these options will be using a non-supported approach for accessing your drive, which could lead to odd problems if Apple makes a change that interferes with the functions of these drivers. At other times, such drivers use inherently less stable approaches (such as the FUSE environment) that could lead to problems if not formatted correctly.
If your drive is working, and the formatting is checked out properly in Windows and other systems, then I'd suggest you check on your NTFS driver and update or replace it. Alternatively, if you only use the drive with your Mac, then consider formatting it to Apple's native Mac OS Extended. Lastly, if you use the drive with multiple operating systems, then consider using FAT32 or ExFAT as the format, as these are fully supported in OS X (unlike NTFS, which is only supported for reading).

Copied files got corrupted in USB3 external drives connected to Macbook Pro, how to fix it?

I use USB3 connected external hard drives in my Macbook Pro (Yosemite 10.10.1) frequently. I had no problem until two months ago. This week I noticed a lot of corrupted files in one drive. Luckily I have a backup, and I copied the files. But the files copied recently were mostly corrupted even though source files are fine. I spent a whole day trying with different options, e.g. erasing the drive, using cp, rsync, ditto etc. I figured out that if I copy single file or folder using cp, the copied files are fine, but rsync, ditto or recursive cp or finder's drag and drop results into a lot of corrupted files. I thought this was the hardware related issue of the external drive. But, I was surprised to notice that all files copied without any problem when I used a old macbook (only has USB2 port, and still use Mavericks). Since I have almost 2TB data to write, USB2 is very slow. I am very disappointed to find out that USB3 in Yosemite has caused all these troubles. If anyone has a solution to this problem, Please suggest.
External hard drive Western Digital My passport.
Disk is formatted to Paragon NTFS

It's good to hear the Macbook Pro & the disk is capable of working correctly. The next test would be to try a clean install of OS X & repeat the copy guess. Adding third party drivers for write support makes the picture a little cloudy IMO.
I'm not really sure what else to suggest other than doing some tests & then taking that data to an Apple store. If you are lucky the genius may follow up on it, or if you submit it as bug reports Apple may follow up on it.
http://apple.com/feedback/
Good luck with it, if you want some other ideas post back

Corrupt Video On External Drive

Hi
When importing video from my Cam Corder to the main drive on my iMac the video imports perfectly every time. But when I import to my external drive there is sometimes fractions of the clips that look corrupted. Its just for maybe half a second of blocky video then it goes back to normal. I've imported the same footage a few times now with different results. The corrupted parts are different each time and its only for less than a second.
To be hones the external drive is 500 GB in an Xcraft case and is quite old. I'm using to see if my machine is fast enough and see if its worth buying a new drive.
Could this be bad sectors on my drive? Or just the machine failing to import correctly due to transfer speeds of external drives? Could I maybe import to the main drive and then copy over would this help?
Is there an app to check for bad sectors? I've Used Disk Utility bit al it says is the disk is fine but the check only took a few seconds so that obviously did not check all the sectors.
Any help appreciated.

Modern camcorders generate a new file for each clip you shoot. You can load the clips into iMovie either directly from the camera, from the SDHC card or from a copy of the SDHC card on a hard disk.
Which OS version and iMovie version do you have?
There are some constraints on the video formats that can be imported that depend on this.
Geoff.

Corrupt External Drive & Reinstall

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