misery, & invisible CD's

[ImRetro]

so my ibook (running 9.1) gets sick

 

I back everything up with my old Retrospect 4.1 for Mac -

 

onto a set of CD-RW's, burned on an external QPS FireWire drive (QPCDRW8432FEMG3 to be precise).

 

i *think* i ran verify. I know that the program recognized the disks and named them, etc. i thought all was right with the world.

 

and I sent the computer off for repairs.

 

 

 

Now I trying to restore from those back-up CD-RW's.

 

I'm using a Mac Powerbook running 9.2.2

 

it has a built-in firewire port.

 

the computer sees our external drive - (QPCDRW8432FEMG3 to be precise) -- and it's own internal drive --as long as I load another CD.

 

 

 

But Retrospect and the computer cannot see the CD-RW's that i burned on this same burner, from either the internal or external drive.

 

 

 

they have their invisibility caps on.

 

I have also gotten a dialog box saying that they are DOS disks and do i want to re-initialize them?

 

 

 

help help help help please please -

 

have i been backing up all my data into never-never-land? do these disks have anything on them?

 

 

 

thanks to any kind soul with advice.

 

 

[AmyJ]

Can you confirm which version of Retrospect you are using? Your post indicated Retrospect 4.1. There were no Firewire QPS drives supported before Retrospect 4.3. Additionally, the majority of these drives were not natively supported in 4.3. They require the use of an RDU (Retrospect Driver Update) to work properly.

 

 

 

If you go to Configure > Devices > Device Status in Retrospect, you can see the vendor and exact model number of the drive you are using. You can then go to the Dantz Hardware Search Engine to determine the specific requirements for use with Retrospect.

 

 

 

www.dantz.com/hardware

[ImRetro]

thank you Amy for your reply - i really appreciate your help!

 

i was puzzled that Retrospect 4.1 seemed happy with this Que drive to *make* the back-up CD set - but then couldn't read them. I would have thought that it would be all or nothing?

 

 

 

Indeed, it does say on the site chart that this drive is only supported by Retrospect 4.3, so i suppose i have to shell out the $100 and upgrade?

 

 

 

now i'm wondering if that will work - ie. will 4.3 be able to read these disks or have i been making "pretend" back-ups?

 

 

 

we shall see, i suppose - but any further comment or help is highly highly welcome - this is all a bit new to me.

 

 

 

thanks again - Im

[AmyJ]

The only way Retrospect would have been able to access this CD-R drive would have been with Retrospect 4.3. The drivers and the extensions needed for Retrospect to use this drive (or any Firewire drive) were not built into the architecture of 4.1. It sounds like you downloaded a Retrospect upgrade at some point in order to be able to use this drive.

 

 

 

Retrospect 4.1 was released approximately 4 years ago. Dantz provided free upgrades until the release of Retrospect 5.0 last month. You should check your hard drive to see if you have a Retrospect upgrade file still available. If not, you will need to upgrade through standard channels.

 

 

 

The data backed up will be viable, restorable data with the proper version of Retrospect. Hope this helps!