Blame it on LaCie
What a difficult time its been lately. As of 2 weeks ago, we were making steady progress of getting our assemble edits together. We had all our footage digitized and were fine-tuning our half-hour work in progress cut. As I was rendering the VERY last effect, the Avid crashed. I couldn’t get it to wake up and had to resort to a manual shut-down. When I started it back up, an error message came up. Apparently, the Avid created a corrupt file on the External drive (Maxtor) where the audio lives and made all the files inaccessible. I couldn’t delete the file so I planned to move the files off and reformat. The computer repetitively froze and in the end, most of the audio files were lost somewhere in the wires. I had no other choice than to reformat the drive and redigitize all the files. Thankfully, Avid is smart enough to relink with the video and after 3 days, all was well again and editing resumed.
That’s when the real disaster occurred.
Avid creates 2 database files on all the drives of the computer. These files help Avid keep track of the files on that particular drive. It’s good maintenance to delete these files to keep the database refreshed. Avid will simply regenerate them next time you start it up. Well, this time Avid didn’t regenerate them and couldn’t find any video files! 200 and some odd gigs of files “lost” on our LaCie BigDisk. Through the “My Computer” window I could see that there was 480 gigs total space and 280 gigs available, but once I clicked into the drive there was only 30 gigs worth of stuff showing. 170 gigs MISSING! I immediately called Tech Support at LaCie and the guy on the phone was very helpful in helping me eliminate the variables to isolate the problem. Except for this little tidbit on help: “Run scandisk on the drive”. Well, I followed his advice and after 4 hours and just at the end of “phase 5”, a message: “Windows was unable to complete scandisk”. Okay. I cancelled out of it and now the drive was renamed as Local M (as opposed to Big AGC) and there was no info on it at all. I could no longer open the drive or do anything without it asking me if I wanted to format it. Since formatting erases everything, I said no. Other advice I was given was to buy Symantec’s System Utilities software, so I did. $70 and many hours later, I was still unable to get into the drive, nor recover any files. I made yet another phone call to LaCie and the new guy on the phone told me it was probably a “Head Crash” and LaCie has only a 1% failure rate. Say hello to 1%. Of all the things to beat the odds of. Having exhausted ALL variables, I sent the drive off to Oregon for LaCie to replace/repair. Looking back on it now, it was probably that drive causing all the crashes to begin with. They tell me it’ll take a week to fix, so we’ll see. I thought as a token for my inconvenience they could throw in a firewire card, no dice. Thanks LaCie.
Fortunately we have an extra 120 gig drive that we’ll be able to at least redigitize the ½ hour cut and dump it out (fingers crossed) and continue looking for money. In the meantime, Beverly Shellrude mailed us a HUGE slide archive of her parents years in Africa, so our library of images has grown immensely.