Final Cut Studio crashing upon opening whenever external drives are active

Question

Hello folks,
I've gotten some great advice on this forum for a while now, through reading other posts. But now I'm hoping I can get some directly tailored advice, as I'm floundering a bit. Thanks in advance for your time, as I've tried to be as thorough as possible in my description of the problems and as-yet failed attempts at solutions.
The project is a full length documentary, and I'm having repeated, regular problems with Final Cut 6.0.5 crashing when I try to open the application.
Now, here are some of the details. FCP will open just fine, if the external hard drives that contain all the media for the project are NOT turned on. However, if the drives are turned on, Final Cut will begin to open, the white box with the application name, registration information, and whatnot will begin, and it will freeze up, hanging there until I force quit. When I force quit, and look at the report, the only information I can get out of it is that the cause is "hanging", though as I'm no expert on reading crash reports, I'm sure I'm missing a lot.
Once I force quit, FCP will not entirely quit. It remains "open", in that I can't open the application again, and my FCP icon in the dock has the little white dot next to it (I'm OS 10.5.6). However, if I eject the drives (which I am sometimes allowed to do, other times I'm told that the drives are still in use by an application), then FCP does resolve its force-quit, and is entirely quit. I can reopen it again immediately afterward with no problem, assuming I haven't turned the drives back on. If I'm not able to eject the drives, then I have to restart.
My workaround so far has been to open FCP without the drives being active, turn on the drives, and then open the project file I want. This works, but seems to be evidence of some serious problems. If I'm opening FCP, and I have the user preference of "open last project upon launch" switched off, why would the hard drives affect FCP? Is FCP trying to read the drives even though it doesn't need any media from them to open in a brand-new project file?
Other issues that have arisen are occasional freezes while in FCP. I will have FCP open (using the workaround), playing fine, and suddenly a click somewhere in the timeline will lead to the spinning beachball. This happens most frequently if I am quickly changing clips, or if I have just brought another application to the foreground and then gone back to FCP. When this happens, and I force quit, once again FCP does not entirely quit, but has to have all the drives ejected to fully quit.
About the drives themselves - I am using 4 GTech 1 TB drives, all of which spin up normally, though two of them are now over 2 years old.
About the software - I reinstalled FCP, and the problems existed beforehand and afterwards. I may do it again.
About the operating system - I archived and installed Leopard, I did not back everything up and zero the drive before installing Leopard.
About the project files - All project files are under 75 MB, most are much smaller. Since it is a long-form piece with over 200 hours at this point, I've been creating multiple projects.
About the render files - I've flushed them repeatedly.
About corrupt files - I've looked through my capture bins and trashed any suspiciously small QuickTime files.
About FCP preferences - I've used FCS Remover a couple times, and the problem reappears.
About permissions - I've repaired permissions repeatedly, and the problem reappears.
About the rest of the system - Compressor won't allow me to submit batches, but from what I understand that is an issue with Apple QMaster. Also, the problems with FCP were there before Compressor was not working. I just today had a problem with System Preferences crashing once it opened, but after deleting the plist for System Preferences it seems to be back up and running fine.
Machine details:
MacPro
2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB memory
667 MHz processor speed
FCP 6.0.5
Thanks again!
Daniel Littlewood
Editor, Don't Think I've Forgotten <Edited by Host>

Answer 1

Hi Michael,
Thanks for your input on this. I went through several steps, including most of the ones you recommended, and came upon what seems to be the problem (knock on wood).
My editing setup is one MacPro, 4 G-Raid drives, and one Sony DSR-11 digital video deck. After clearing up more space the G-Raid drives to bring them to about 10% free space, things seemed to be running smoother - there were less crashes within FCP. However, I was still getting crashes on opening FCP, at the same "splash screen" point (after all the AE Effects and Video Effects had loaded).
Running Disk Utility on all drives showed no problems, and unfortunately I don't have DiskWarrior (though that may be an upcoming purchase).
It wasn't until I went through your suggestion of starting FCP with the individual drives connected that I got somewhere. FCP would start up fine with one or even two drives connected, but not with three or four. Doing a little research on that brought me to two threads on Creative Cow about G-Raid drives and daisy-chaining:
http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/176/856609
http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/176/856570
Once I put two of the drives onto the rear FireWire800 port, and two of the drives into the front FireWire800 port, with the DSR-11 still in the back FireWire 400 port, my problems disappeared. Huzzah! The G-Raid folks recommend no more than three FireWire devices connected at a time, and lightening the load on the FireWire port by uncoupling the four-drive long daisy-chain has immediately helped. Now, I'll keep an eye on it, and may potentially buy a PCI card if something goes wonky again, but I am very happy to have gotten things up and running again. Cheers!