emusonacid!

Something telle me that nobody is going to be able to help me with this but i've tried everything i can think of.

I've been using an E-synth classic rack running EOS 4.62 for years and i've never had any real problems with it until today. Basically i have it connected to my PC via SCSI and was just moving some samples over to the emu to save on the hard drive. I pressed save on the emu and the save page came up with the hard drive selected but something random like 'f000' under folder and bank. Going into the hard drive via the disk page revealed that all of the folders had odd icons i've never seen before and all of the folder names had disappeared.
It has crashed on me a few times over the years so i turned off the PC then turned off the emu, only to find that when i powered it up again the hard drive appears to be completely blank. When i try to access it i just get the 'No Folders Exist On Drive!' message. If i try and get info on it via EOS is comes up as 'Type: Hard Disk Fs:??? Capacity:0.0mb Used:0.0mb Folders:0/0 Banks:0/0,' although it still spins up fine and is recognised by the sampler and my PC SCSI card.

It seems to me that all my data is still on there but somehow the EOS file system has be wiped from the drive. Does anyone have any advice on what i might be able to do to rescue this situation? Unless i can somehow access the data on this drive i've just lost 10 years worth of samples and tracks! Typically i had it all backed up until about 6 months ago when i needed the back up drive for something else and never got around to backing up again.

"Type: Hard Disk Fs:??? Capacity:0.0mb Used:0.0mb Folders:0/0 Banks:0/0"

Well... with this display dead sure no rescue, gone forever. You cannot bring back just EOS file system without formatting drive.
Although HD can fail by itself, most probably PC somehow accessed/scrambled samplers HD - put that strange icons and stuff, that can be dangerous as you experienced, I feel sad for you for not having a backup.

There are firms that specialize in restoring bad hard discs, perhaps they can also help with emuformatted HD. I'd asked them. Might cost some, though.

I think the problem here is that i just got a new motherboard for my PC and it doesn't appear to like my SCSI card very much. I pulled the old hard drive out of my sampler in the hope that i might be able to access it as raw data with chicken systems translator, by connecting it directly to the internal SCSI port of the card but the ways its been acting i'm a little dubious of doing so.

Because i have a remix to do fairly urgently i got hold of an external scsi drive which i connected between the PC and the sampler. Termination is on for the sampler and the PC and off for the hard drive. This setup worked perfectly for a day and was turned on and off at least 2 or 3 times. The next day, having changed absolutely nothing, sample transfers using wavelab started locking up and crashing the sampler at about 80% done. this got progressively worse throughout today and now it won't get further than 3 or 4% without crashing the sampler. How is this possible? SCSI is the only protocol i know of where things 'kind of work' sometimes and can get better or worse at random. You'd think it'd either work or not work at all!

I think i'll get a new SCSI card and try the old sampler drive with a new card in my PC. I'm not really holding out for a positive result but i've just about had it with EMU SCSI.

The issue was with my SCSI card in my PC. I just got an Adaptec 2940 and now everything works fine.

Theres a lesson to be learnt. If you don't want your hard drive randomly wiped, get a decent Adaptec SCSI card in the first place.