CHRISTOPHJPETERChristoph Peter

This error showed up when a friend asked me to fix this 2 TB Western Digital MyBook Studio Edition Drive. The drive can not be mounted, repaired or verified.

invalid BS_jmpBoot error

Long story short there is no way to simply fix this error. You can try with TestDisk but I had no luck with it. Don’t jump out of the window just yet since your data is most likely still there. Only the partition table on the drive is damaged and all your data is still in place. Any Data Recovery tool will be able to get your data out of that damaged partition.

If this happend to you consider reading this link

A sad but typical story about why one needs to use backups when dealing with computers

Last Night a friend of mine gave me his almost full 2 TB Western Digital Studio Edition that has a 2 drive RAID 0/1 built in. He told me that he used it with his mac and everything worked just fine. When he connected it to his PC and tried to move some data to the drive it stoped working, which is no surprise since the drive is formated as HSF+ in a RAID 0 configuration. Windows can not handle HFS and somehow managed to serverly damage the pratition table on the drive. After using all tools known to me such as TestDisk, Mac OS X disc utility and Ubuntus partition manager i gave it up as damaged beyond repair. The next step will be to use a data recovery tool to pull out the data, that is still intact on the drive, but all of these programs cost at least 100$. In addition we have to finde 2 Terabytes of free space to recover the data to which also will not come cheap.

Since he used the drive in a RAID 0 mode there was no backup anyway but the very same thing could have happened if it was set up as a RAID 1.

When putting together my home server setup I was considering using one of these RAID drives vs. two stand alone drives and I am glad I chose the two single drives.

Pro RAID

• the consumer versions like the western digital ones are really easy to set up
• good protection from hardware failure
• automatic data restoring
• only Raid 1 will give you some sort of backup
• RAID 0 gives you speed gains
• usually the read feature is a bit more costly than two stand alone drives

Contra RAID

• no protection from software errors
• if the RAID it self craps out on you there is very little chance on restoring things
• if you delete stuff it is gone on both RAID discs instantly
• if the partition is damaged both drives are affected
• the physical proximity of these raid drives makes it more likely to die together in case of power surge for example
• not very flexible – I can always grab one of my two storage drives and go to a friends house to get some data and when I get back home it just syncs to the other drive and everything is fine unless the unlikely case of both drives die at the same time

I do not recommend a single RAID 0,1 or 5 setup as a sufficient backup solution. Backup often, on different devices in different locations!!

Finally Apple released an update to the mac mini product line. I finally got mine and its already up and running. I set it up to be my HTPC, file server and web server. I want to go through each of these three topics and describe the configuration I used.

Hardware:

The mac mini is way too expensive for the hardware you get. I was really disappointed at first because they even raised the price from 439?(with student discount) t0 526?. For 550 euros I could get twice as much ram and way more disk space, eSata, blueray and hdmi output easily with a linux or windows machine. BUT OS X makes it still worth the money FOR ME. I do not agree with the back and forth disccussion about macs vs. pcs. A computer is a TOOL, like a car is for transportation. There is diffrent cars with different uses and different prices. Some cars are easy to drive some require a skilled driver… Everybody has to decide for himself if its worth the money and if it will do what you want it do in the way you want it to be done. Be glad there is a choice!

1 mac mini 3/2009, 2.0 GHZ, 2GB RAM

mac mini

Mac Mini – The mean reasons I chose the mac mini over other more powerful computer were that its really small and really really quite. The mini is inaudible and I really hated the constant buzz from my old server, even though I already spent way to much money on expensive CPU coolers. The power consumption is also quite low and since the server will be always on its a big plus. The display output options are sufficient. I use the included mini DVI to DVI adapter and connect it to an DVI to HDMI cable. As soon as reasonably priced mini display port to hdmi adapters hit the market I will change to that. I like the built in SPIDIF audio connectors and the built in Firewire 800 port. In combination witth the 2 FW800 enabled drives it is really faster than a USB 2.0 solution and not much more expensive.

2 Western Digital My Book Studio Edition 1 TB

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition

Western Digital My Book Studio Edition – Even though I had some problems with this type of hard drive before I chose them because of their low price and their ability to shut down when not in use. For a HTPC noise is a key factor. The new drives are really quiet in the first place but if the server or just the drives are not in use they turn off and are therefor completly silent. The only downturn to this is that when you want to access the drives it takes a couple of seconds to wake up from sleep but that is not a realy problem. The drives come with a 5 year warranty. Since I already experienced the rather smooth and fast exchange process of such a drive I do not expect any major worries in the next 5 years( In 5 years I hope we will be carrying Terrabytes on our thumb drives).

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WD mybook 500GB pro edition

today my time machine backup broke again. I tried reformatting the drive, hooking it up to the computer directly, firewire, usb nothing worked. at first the computer sees the drive and is able to mount it but after a short time the drive simply turnes off during file transfers. I called up western digital techsupport to see how I can fix the problem:

the solution: the drive has a broken thermal control unit and this can only be fixed by getting your drive replaced.

so I signed up for western digitals RMA program and now I am waiting for a replacement drive to be shipped to me. the friendly tech support guy told me I might even get a mybook studio edition which would be quite nice. so I now I have to wait and see how this whole replacement things works out.

Update I @ 9.12.2008:

today I got a package from western digital. It had a probably used western digital 500GB studio edition in it. The being used part sucks I think but since I only sent in a mybook pro edition a used studio edition seems to be a fair trade. The inital setup worked just fine but about 5 attempts to create a new time machine backup failed. The disk mounts allright but at some point during the file transfer it simply shuts down again. if I then hit the power button at the back it comes back up and mounts again which the old one did not do. Anyhow this is just not right for a product with such a price and that is advertised to be “mad for a mac”. As I type time machine is backing up to the drive which is now hooked up to my airport extreme router. I will see if it will be able to complete the backup that way.

western digital 500 GB studio edition

Update II @ 10.12.2008:

Over night the backup of time machine finished successfully to the drive hooked up to my airport extreme. This morning I reconnected the drive via firewire 800 and deleted the old stuff, did two small backups all without problems. I take the drive now as working, since it will be hooked up via usb to the router anyway. Now I have to send Western Digital my old disk or they will charge me for the new one.

Update III @ 10.12.2008 22:56

around noon the drive did not wake up for a backup until i pulled the power plug. So I called up tech support and told them about it. He advised me to to perform a firmware upgrade which i did. after that everything seemed normal. But After rebooting the mac, I tried to launch the backup and it froze my mac. no piece of software or hardware has ever frozen my mac. I mean seriously this is an external hard drive not a crappy external tv card with weird drivers or anything. any 5 ? usb drive can do what this 150 ? piece can’t. I currently try to continue the backup. its been in a preparing state for ever and just as I type this it started to copy data , and it really finished. great. wonder what happens in an hour when the next backup is due. Anyhow I will call up tech support tomorrow again and have the drive replaced again. This is supposed to be a reliable backup solution. luckily i have mac girlfriends macbook to backup my critical data. I don’t know what I would do if I really needed the drive for work or anything. man I hate tech support!

One thing I know now for sure is I will get an offsite online backup solution, backblaze will be my choice. its 50$ a year thats about 40 euros a year. 150? for a WD studio Edition / 40 ? = more than 3 years. thats longer than the warranty of these drives.

Update IV @ 11.12.2008 1:01

now the drive appears to be working again. it finished serveral backups just fine while powering down in between. I will keep the laptop running all night to see if it can keep it up till next morning.

Update V @ 11.12.2008 9:44

the drive has beend working all night. finishing several backups powering up and down. I will keep the drive for testing over the weekend and decide monday whether to send it back or not.

Update VI @ 16.12.2008 23:05

I decided to give the drive another chance over the long weekend I had, and it worked. no more hickups, i open the lid of my macbook pro, i hear the drive power up, time machine does what it needs to do, the back up is finished, exactly ten minutes later the drive powers down. I mailed back my old mybook pro. hopefully it gets there before the holidays otherwise western digital is going to charge me the ridiculous amount of 384 dollars for the new 500GB studio edition which is like 150 ? at amazon. but I have faith in the postal service. I hope the drive lasts till I get my new mac mini server once the new models arrive at macworld in january. At this point I am totally clueless which external harddrives to get to extend the storage of the server, since I do not want to trust Western Digital with my really important data.

Update VII @ 22.09.2009 19:21

I have used the drive now since the last update without any further problems. I have been on vacation the last 2 weeks and after coming back, it powered up, backed up more than 13 Gigabytes and went back to sleep like a charm. This is how I want things to work.

I will keep updating this post as things progress.

WD mybook 500GB pro edition

I noticed that time machine kept preparing for a backup on my western digital mybook 500GB pro edition external harddrive that is connected to an Apple Airport extreme basestation. At first I thought it was a time machine problem but soon I realized that my external harddrive was the source of the problem.

Sympthoms:

• the disk is not mountable
• the disk does not show up in finder
• the airport utility can not access the base station as long as the disk is connected
• the disk does show up in the disk utility

After screwing with it for a bit I decided to wipe the entire drive in order to fix the problem. Both erasing and repartitioning the disk resulted in an error message saying “resource is busy”.

What did not help:

• restarting the disk
• restarting the computer
• booting from the os x disc and using the disc utility from there will not help either

So I was ready to give up and looked up the warranty information on the western digital website – which is really really good by the way. They had a small windows diagnosis tool for download one should try befor applying for a replacement. So I booted up in windows XP ran the diagnose and it toled me everything was perfectly fine.

The solution to the problem:

just use the standard built in windows XP disk management and wipe the old apple partition and replace it with a new windows NTFS partion( just for now). After this step windows should already be able to see and use the disc under my computer. Now simply reboot to OS X and launch the disk utility, reformat the disk to apples file system and reconnect it the base station.

Note:

Unfortunatly this solution results in complete loss of all your data that was on the drive. But I found no better way.

 I recently bought a Western Digital 500GB Mybook and was very pleased. The Firewire 800 is really fast and the automated power up and down is very convenient. I haven’t been to my flat for about three weeks now and was shocked to see that my Mybook would not show any sign of life when I connected it to my Macbook Pro. Pushing the button, using USB or Firewire 400 did not change anything either. No need to throw away your harddrive yet. The solution is simple:

Simply disconnect the power adapter, and all connections to your computer. Then reconnect and it should power up and fulfill its duty.