DCP drives that are not recognized / won't ingest

[Peter Mork]

Here's a problem that's been vexing me for a while: DCP drives - the standard drives that Deluxe and other major distribs send out - that may load once or twice, but then for no reason return this message when you try to ingest them:

"Unable to mount the firewire/usb drive", followed by "Unable to mount source 'Sat'". Never with a "more info" option, so no clue to why it decided to quit working.

Occasionally a drive will misbehave as soon as we get it; other times it will work, and then suddenly it won't. And when it won't I can try it in other units but get the same result 9 times out of 10.
We don't drop our drives or mistreat them. They just decide not to cooperate. Now and then swapping a shoe or SATA or USB cable will make a difference, but usually not.

We use GDC PSD 3000-P (the older, 5V type) and PSD 3000-Pe (newer 12V), with GDC SX-3000 Standalone Integrated Media Block.

Could power cutting off mid-ingest ever damage a drive? Otherwise I am stumped.

[Steve Guttag]

I've seen systems, not necessarily GDC, that once it has seen a drive it can have a hard time seeing THAT drive again, like it is trying to assign the drive a different letter for the same drive. When people remove the drive on the GDC, it is very important that the drive is "closed" before removing the drive. Is that always being done?

[Peter Mork]

Not necessarily always! In the heat of panic, I have been known to unplug a running drive that needed to be somewhere else, fast. Have not correlated this with failures to ingest up to now, but will try to do so.

You know, after years of Windows and Mac computers tut-tutting over my pulling out a USB drive without "ejecting", and nothing bad ever happening as a result, can you blame anyone who thinks no harm done?

[Marcel Birgelen]

I've needed to perform a File System check/repair on several drives before I could ingest them. I usually link them to a Linux system via USB3 and run "fsck" manually on them. Mostly it's simply an incorrectly closed journal, but I've also found more major problems. I still don't understand why many DCP playback systems mount drives in read-only mode and change into read/write only when absolutely necessary.