Strange external disk problem;

I booted up my system this morning, and when the desktop appeared, a dialogue box popped up stating that "The external hard drive could not be repaired. Please back up system and reformat hard drive."

I've never seen this before. This drive is a Seagate 2 TB, and is only half full. But it contains all of my video projects and all files. It's less than 3 months old, and has given no trouble. I have a huge project on it that has over 60 days of editing.

QUESTION: So do I just copy the entire drive to another external, then format it again, then copy the files back onto the drive once again - and FCP will have no problem in finding all of my projects?" Is there any way this action will change the pathways to any of these video files?

And I assume during the formatting process, I need to name that drive the same name as it had before...right?

Thank for any input...

Jonny Cates

Rafael......I did run Disk Utilities, and it said it could not repair. I'm running OS 10.6.3, and I only have Diskwarrior 4.1 ....but I'm not sure if that version will work with 10.6.3. I certainly don't want to scatter files all over the place with an older version of DW. I have that drive backed up anyway, and I guess I will reformat it and re-copy all the FCP files. I know it will take a long time to do over a TB - as opposed to running DW....but I need to go ahead and start.

Thanks!

Jonny Cates

Well Rafael... I ran DiskWarrior Version 4.3. It took a looooong time for the disc to boot up, and I finally clicked on the rebuild and did other repairs too, but only repairs to that one external drive.
Everything seems to have gone well, except for one issue. I had (4) FCP Projects stored on that disc, and they all seem to open and work fine now, except for one. That project was the last project I created, and was the one presently working on. Now when I try to open that project by clicking on that FCP Project icon - I get a message that says...

! Unable to open project file.

(And that's all it says. It doesn't say why or what.)
Even if I go to the backup drive where I copied everything, it still says the same thing.

I don't know it this has anything to do with it, but some of the video files associated with that project file, are nested in multiple folders. Some of this footage was shot with a Nikon DSLR, and imported it from the camera - using the Nikon Software. I then copied that folder to the external. Inside that folder was another folder with the AVI files. I then converted all those into ProRes - in yet another folder. I did read in the DiscWarrior report that "multiple nested folders" could be a problem. Could this be why the project won't open? Or is it something else. I can see all the video files with the get info command, so I know all the video files are there and work.
It's just the project file itself won't mount up with the sequence I was working on. Any ideas?

Thanks much for anymore input...

Jonny Cates