Hi Joseph, thanks for your reply.

Writing to an existing vault. The problem has been exacerbated by errors on the library drive, which I ultimately replaced and restored from a second vault (we keep both a local and a remote vault). I’ve got a new drive on order to become a replacement local vault (which is where the error is happening). I am however pretty sure the vault has existed since Aperture 2 but it worked fine until mid-February this year.

I have also replaced the Library drive as the old one had screwy problems like being unexpectedly ejected (NOT while updarting a vault), and Aperture deciding it had access permission problems (solvable by taking everything down for about 15 minutes including turning the library drive off, and then restarting, would you believe).

In other words there have been multiple symptoms and I’m not sure that there is only one problem, but this message suggested there COULD be a problem with data in the Library not just on the Vault - but I don’t know. As soon as I get the new vault drive I will start a brand-new vault and we’ll see. I will definitely post to this thread about the results regardless.

Dave

Will do a new vault as soon as we get the new drive (I hate to blow off the one we have even if it could be bad). The dismounting drives is interesting although the specifics are a little different. Two OWC firewire 800 drives, and ONE but not both went away. My recollection is that we even saw the problem when we moved them to USB. This is on a 27” iMac. Makes me wonder if the dismounting is a symptom that could be caused by more than one thing.

Joseph,

I think we had the dismount at least once since moving the drives to USB but so many things have happened I am not entirely certain right now and wouldn’t swear to it. I replaced the Library drive (and restored from a second vault as I said) with a WD 2TB drive (largely because that’s what I had available). It is running happily on FW800 with no dismounts so far. I left the OWC Vault drive on USB but never saw a dismount on that drive anyhow. No Drobo in the picture :-). So if I zapped the existing vault drive, created a virgin vault and reran the vault operation and it failed, I still wouldn’t be sure whether the problem was in the library or the vault drive - and I wanted to move the vault to a larger drive anyhow.

Further status:

Acquired a new 2TB drive and initialized it for a vault. Did a vault operation to it. Took approximately 12 hours (library and vault both FW800) and I was convinced it had hung near the end but it finally finished successfully. No IOERROR messages about bad JPEGs in the console log. So provisionally the final (apparent) problem was associated with the old vault volume, although I don’t know if there was a real hardware problem, the bad images having been previously vaulted to it and screwing the vault operation up, or a vault created prior to Aperture 3. Still don’t know what created the problem in the first placel, alas. NB the library something like 800GB at this point; 77K+ managed masters.

I’m holding the old vault drive (and old library drive) and not messing with them until we are absolutely sure the new environment is stable and we have vaults in two places. Then I plan to work with the old drives. I’ll run repairs, but then write zeros through each drive - I had a previous drive (another OWC drive as it happens) which passed the disk utility check and repair but when I tried the write zeroes, the disk utility blew up. Sent it in for replacement, but they are still waiting on drives from Thailand I gather.

Sorry it has taken so long for me to get back to this item. After establishing a new local vault successfully, I attempted to do a vault update to the remote drive I restored the library from. The update never completed. So I acquired a 2TB portable drive (with Firewire) and set up a new remote vault, and although it took about 16 hours it completed. We now have 2TB drives for the library, the local vault, and the remote vault, all of which were working.

The next step is to see if there are any actual hardware errors with the drives we had been using, or whether it was all due to a corrupted write (which is what I think) in the first place. Either way, thank you to everyone who responded!