Hi There,

Today I swicthed on my G5 ready to finish up some animation work for a corporate video, and to my horror I got one of those 'Device Removed' errors that you usually get if you pull out an ipod or external disk without ejecting it. Only in this case it was referring to my Media drive. which is a 400GB internal drive where I store all my music, photos and work files.

I tried restarting, same thing happened.

I tried one of those PRAM resets, safe mode, and even logging in as root.
but every time, same error, the internal drive where all my most valuable data is stored still acted as if I'd pulled it out of it's socket.

I resorted to connecting my macbook pro to my G5 with the G5 in firewire disk mode.
this had mixed results, finder seemed to want to crash constantly, lots of spinning beach balls,
I tried opening diskwarrior and it stopped responding while searching for disks.

I started over, firewire disk mode again. this time the drives all appeared in the finder, and before trying to look at them, I went to disk utility, found my media drive, and simply pressed
'verify disk'. it seemed to be working, doing it's thing, for 20 minutes or so. then it declared
'the volume [Media appears to be OK' and at that moment finder restarted, and my media drive popped up, the folders and files I hold dear all appearing to still exist.... yay.

so.... now, I have my files in front of me, all seems well to an extent. but I am scared to restart the G5 just yet, to try again. after all, what if this is my one chance to back up? I wouldn't want to pass it up. so currently I am copying some of my most treasured files across the network onto my girlfriends mac pro. this is taking ages however, it seems to be very slow to transfer via firewire-then through ethernet.

Anyway, the reason for my post is just to get any advice at all. do you think verifying the disk in firewire disk may have solved the problem? is it safe to try restarting and booting my G5 as normal or would others do as I am currently doing and freak out and try backing everything up first? I don't have a huge amount of space on my external drives, so my only option is to painstakingly transfer everything over to my gf's MacPro and also onto one of my old PC's which has a bit of pace left on it over the network. this could take a number of days.... but I tend to think it might be worth it if something is seriously wrong with the drive (or possibly its something else in the G5 connection to the drive)

Blah... a bit of a ramble, but if anyone has any thoughts I'd be glad to hear them

In your shoes, I'd be doing the following:

1) reading my posting from a few weeks ago which explains SMART Status, what it is and how to check it, and
2) buying another hard drive ASAP and backing everything up to it before it dies completely. Hard drives are cheaper than mud these days (eg, Seagate 500GB SATA for $109 and will be safer and faster than trying to crank it over the network.

Rememebr: data that is not backed up -- preferably more than once -- is data you do not want.

Thanks for the tip, I'd ideally like to replace the drive as soon as possible.
just unsure of the logistics of how to transfer stuff to it once I have it.
should I buy a cheap External Enclosure for this ?
or perhaps swap out the new drive for my system drive and do the transfer via
firewire disk mode on the laptop...

Get yourself a decent external enclosure, preferably one that talks FireWire, and put your problem drive into it, and slot in a new higher-capacity drive in its place internally.

Once you've got all your stuff copied back into the new internal drive, you can use the old one for backups -- plug it in once a week or so and copy your data back to it, when it's done unplug it and put it somewhere safe.