Six dead hard drives in a month.

Question

So far the number is six in the last month. I am ready to go out and buy pens instead.
Can anyone shed any light on this, please? It feels as though I've hit a sinkhole - every time I try and spend time and money sorting it out I fall deeper into trouble.
I won't bore you with too much of the sorry tale of the first five drives. One was our G4 Mac Mini's internal drive and I guess that just went out of old age - but it did choose a bad moment to expire! Another was a partition on my internal hard drive and I've managed to format that one - luckily nothing indispensible was on it.
But the other four were really bad news. They include the old internal drive from my MacBook Pro (late 2006), my Time Machine backup drive, a 1.5gb Seagate drive which was almost full of all my iTunes music - podcasts, purchased music files etc. and a brand new solid state I was preparing to use inside my MacBook Pro. Each of these four drives was attached to my MacBook Pro by Firewire 800, Firewire 400, docking station attached to an OWC SATA Expresscard and USB. Is it possible my computer is letting out spikes of electricity over its external connections? I've had the logic board replaced which improved some other problems; but this one continues. I actually haven't anything left to plug into my Mac now. My network drives are the only things keeping me sane - because at least I know I have some of my stuff backed up on those. But some of the drives WERE my backups so I'm sure I've lost some things.
I need some urgent advice about the new OCZ Solid State Vertex Plus hard drive. (SATA II, 120gb) and what is happening at the moment.
I bought this with a view to moving the current hard drive over to replace the non-working Superdrive. I'm still waiting for a caddy I've ordered but decided today to copy over everything from my hard drive except my user folder and other non-essentials using my docking station attached to an OWC SATA Expresscard. This went remarkably quickly - just under a minute per gigabyte. I then tried to start up from the new drive (still in the SATA docking station). I boot in verbose mode and I noted that it got as far as loading Bluetooth and then refused to proceed any further with the startup. So I restarted from the internal drive and ran Disk Utility. On permissions repair I got loads of messages starting with ‘Open error 5: “input/output error”'. So I tried repairing the disk. The whole disk wouldn’t repair - an error message said something was missing. But I managed to get the volume to run the repair routine; but was told at the end that it couldn’t be repaired. I decided to partition the disk again. Now Disk Utility got so far and just stopped with the message: “Waiting for disks to reappear” on the progress bar.
It's still waiting, over an hour later. What should I do? Is there some way I can get the disk to 'reappear'? It can't be that invisible if System Report can see it! If I try and quit Disk Utility it tells me doing that could render the disk unuseable. It no longer appears on the desktop but in System Report there is no sign of ill health. Has this disk died with all the others or is there a way I can rescue the situation?

Answer 1

On your drive:
Yes, I did realise you were offering advice by telling me a story of your own bad experience with a drive and I was merely being sympathetic while noting that I will never clone a drive again, as I hope my words indicated:
frannbug wrote:
Nevertheless I will never again attempt to clone a drive if there's the remotest chance it might invalidate my warranty.
As for my drive being beyond redemption:
I recognise that too, but here we are talking about SIX drives, one after the other, all attached to the ports of a computer, within one month, when my two network drives attached to my Apple BaseStation are still going strong. I agree that when a drive goes, it goes, although I was once sent a replacement mains plug to try when an Iomega drive went before they replaced it.
However when that many drives go in one month, is it so very wrong to be asking questions just to make sure it is just a horrendous coincidence? I've often searched for answers on this forum and discovered something I didn't know before (like not cloning onto a new drive). I was hoping that out of the vast hordes of Mac users who read these forums there might have been a bunch of people who had suffered the same problem and found the cause for it. I really needed some guidance before proceeding so I was dismayed when there was no response - although I realise you only get about an hour on page one on such a popular site.
After such a string of disasters you begin to feel rather afraid of trying to sort the problem out for fear of seeing further problems arise. I've spent quite a lot of money on this and have just seen the whole thing get worse. That is surely the time to stop and check it's not something I'm doing or something wrong with the computer that's causing it all, rather than just continuing to shrug my shoulders and buy more and more drives.
That said, I'm very grateful to you for informing me of the dangers of cloning a drive. I'd never have worked that one out on my own, becasue it seems so illogical. I can't fathom how the drive knows it is being fed data which is a clone rather than data that is from a DVD install disk. To me that's like a cupboard collapsing because you've put a blue tea service in it rather than a green one. Please understand I'm not doubting what you say; I'm just curious to know what it is that is so damaging about a clone.