I have 2 external drives connected to my iMac one with my iTunes media on and one with my photographs on both using Firewire.
Each time I restart Aperture 3, I lose the link to my pictures and have to reconnect all. When I go to the reconnect tool it shows that Aperture is trying to find the images on the iTunes drive?
If I reconnect the images everything works fine until I quit and restart Aperture and have to start all over again. Is this a setting in Aperture or the hardware that needs addressing?
Although I prefer Aperture as my workflow, I'm currently using lightroom just to deal with images but would really like to solve this issue if possible.
Many thanks in advance for any help or resolutions you may have
Man that sounds like a problem I had with Aperture 1.0 I stopped using Aperture for years. Used LR for that time. I have two externals drives as well but Aperture 3 has been great. Try holding down the option and apple key when starting Aperture and run the first aid. Start with Repair Permissions then restart Aperture. If still having the same problem go to repair database then rebuild databases. Let me know if that works. I have LR 3 as well but know I have stuck with Aperture. Good luck.
George
I think we’re getting somewhere, it’s definitely the drives. When I unplug the iTunes drive everything appears to reconnect again.
I tried to Run permissions repair on the drives themselves (using Disk Utility) but it wouldn’t let me do that on the external drive, and I selected the drive, Get Info on it and click “Ignore Ownership on this Volume” which didn’t help.
John,
Cool, some progress. And the drive names are all different, right?
Don’t forget to try different cables, too. That’s a lot easier (and cheaper) than trying new drives ;-)
@PhotoJoseph
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Drives are all different names, I’ll try different cables tomorrow.
Thanks for your help so far………..
Just swapped the existing cables around, and it seems to have rectified the issues. Have rebooted a couple of times with all drives connected and the referenced files are still linked, here’s hoping!
Back to where we were, I’m now trying out Western Digital’s support as it would appear to be a drive connection fault.
Thanks all for trying, if you have any other ideas please let me know.
John,
Sorry it wasn’t as simple as swapping cables around. But you did try DIFFERENT cables too, right? Could be a bad FW cable.
If you have a utility like DiskWarrior it couldn’t hurt to run that on your external drives, and of course the Mac OS X included Disk Utility.
@PhotoJoseph
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Just wanted to update as I’m pretty sure this is now resolved! And it may help somebody else in the future.
Western Digital Support emailed me:
“In other to resolve this issue you will have to deactivate the virtual CD (SmartWare, the backup program that comes with the drives) ) from one of the drives. To deactivate the program you will have to install the update for “WD SmartWare Utilities (VCD & Firmware) for Mac” from the link below.
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?modelno=WDBAAJ0020HSL-EESN&x… “
I’ve tried it over the last couple of days and it appears to be fine now.
John,
That’s great news! I hope your pain can ease someone else’s suffering :)
All the best, and thanks for posting the conclusion, and for being an www.ApertureExpert.com supporter
@PhotoJoseph
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Hi George, Thanks for your reply, I have tried that, I even went so far as to delete the library and start again, but the same thing happens.
Man that just like what I went through wit 1.0
One thing I remember is not shortly
after I stopped using Aperture
my external drive failed. How old
are your drives
It has been suggested that it may have something to do with 2 of my drives working with the same UUID. So I’ve moved some image files across to another drive and imported them into a new library and so far, so good. If it stays stable for a couple of days I’ll switch back to Aperture and try it again.
Finger’s crossed!
Thanks for your comments to date, it looks like you’re right and it’s a drive issue not an Aperture one.
UPDATE: Spoke too soon, just rebooted and the other drive has done the same. For some reason it keeps defaulting to my iTunes drive, the simple answer is unplug the iTunes drive but that’s not really a fix. I can’t help wondering if it were the drives at fault, wouldn’t Lightroom do the same?
UPDATE: Spoke too soon, just rebooted and the other drive has done the same. For some reason it keeps defaulting to my iTunes drive, the simple answer is unplug the iTunes drive but that’s not really a fix. I can’t help wondering if it were the drives at fault, wouldn’t Lightroom do the same?
John,
By any chance are your external hard drives named the same thing (i.e. Macintosh HD)? Each drive should have a unique name (that includes the internal drive, which is probably named Macintosh HD). As you mentioned, someone had suggested that there’s a drive ID conflict, and that ID is like an Ethernet address; it’s assigned by the computer each time the drive is mounted (or rebooted). This is why you can’t reliably build a software RAID between two FW drives. But I digress…
If the names are the same, change them. Run permissions repair on the drives themselves (using Disk Utility), or even select the drive, Get Info on it and click “Ignore Ownership on this Volume”. Reverse the order of your drives on the FireWire chain. Try new FireWire cables.
It’s not an Aperture issue; it’s either hardware or configuration, I’m betting. And keep in mind that while you may have tried moving your masters to another drive, the iTunes drive hasn’t changed and that could be causing the conflict.
good luck, keep us posted. Problems like this are a big PITA to fix but worth the effort once sorted out!
@PhotoJoseph
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