external HD help needed

[jbturof]

Hi.
I recorded a day's worth of video on my Sony HVR-DR60 external drive today but when I tried to transfer it to my laptop, the drive freezes and won't copy anything. It mounts fine.....I can see all of the files, they're all the correct sizes....the camera sees the drive fine and reads/writes to it....but transferring the files fails every time.

Any ideas of what's going on? Bad Firewire on the laptop maybe??
Suggestions are urgently welcome!

Thank you!
Jeff
Sony Z5U camera/HVR-DR60/HP i7 Elitebook/8GB RAM/nVidia Quadro K3000 video

[Baldrick]

Can you copy files from your computer to it? And then copy that file back to your computer?

I would try find another computer to test on.

[jbturof]

No. I can make a new folder on the DR60 but can't copy anything to it/from it.
Does the same thing when I try....locks up and the computer gives me a message saying "<drive name> refers to a location that is unavailable...."
The crazy part is the whole drive locks up. I have to pop the battery to even turn it off.
Going to try and find another computer to test but not sure if anyone here has one with a firewire port. Not exactly commonplace.

[jbturof]

just tried again and now finally got an error message....Error 0x80070037--the specified network device is no longer available
see screen cap attached

[Nelson37]

If you have another Firewire cable, try that. If it will connect USB, try that.

If no joy, next step is to disassemble the enclosure, remove the drive, and connect it internally to a desktop. Alternately, you could try another, different enclosure but I would go for the direct connection first, if possible.

[aedipuss]

the obvious question. did you put the unit in "computer mode" before connecting?

[Bjs]

Connect the power adapter before connecting to pc ... relying on battery charge is bad idea.

Have you tried the transfer utility supplied by the manufacturer ?

[jbturof]

Thanks for the suggestions.
I've never seen a transfer utility.
I contacted Sony and their only suggestion was to send it to them to extract the data.
Answers to questions above:
Yes....was set to Computer Mode.
I did try a couple other Firewire cables. No dice.
I have a contact who was trained in hacking computers and he attempted to hack into it to extract the video. He couldn't bypass Sony's encoding.
I think I will attempt to pop the case open and install internally. Thanks for that suggestion. I was hesitant about it, but if you feel it's possible, I'll give it a shot. My clients want this video footage so I really don't a month to waste sending it to Sony.

Thanks again!

[Nelson37]

Is this a dedicated SONY box or just a generic hard drive enclosure.

There shouldn't be any "Sony Encoding" and essentially nothing to hack. Never heard of any "training program" for hackers. I HAVE heard of a whole bunch of people who don't know shit from Shinola and think they do.

IF, and ONLY IF, this is a dedicated Sony box, then I would double-check with SONY about removing the drive. If it is indeed a generic external hard drive then no problem.

Absolutely no reason to make it more complicated which is exactly why SONY may have done just exactly that. If this is critical stuff, check first.

[smrpix]

Google your error code and Look up cougar point chipset flaw. It is a known intel problem. You may have a machine that is affected.

[aedipuss]

oh it's a sony box. inside is a 1.8 inch hard drive.