[timkline]

Hey folks, I have a hard drive that's not cooperating anymore.. here's what happened

I was working in Final Cut Pro. I was taking some video that was rendered for dvd video and trying to use it in a timeline... anyway, the mac froze up bigtime, all I could do was restart. All of the data was on an external 500 gig Western Digital drive.

When I restarted, the OS asked me if I wanted to reformat the new disk, so I said no, unplugged the drive and plugged it back in, then the drive icon was there and all. I started up final cut pro again, and it said there was a problem with my scratch disk, which was the external. So, I opened up the drive folder and everything was there, I could open files and all, but when I tried to copy stuff over to it, it gave me an error saying the file name was too big (test.txt was too big?). I opened up Disk Utility and it tried to repair the drive, and it gave me an error, something about it being unable to unmount the disk. I repaired permissions on my main drive, tried again and nothing.

So, I rebooted again. Got the same reformat dialog, clicked no. unplugged the drive and plugged it back in, then the icon didn't come back. The lights went on on the drive and it made the same old start up sounds it always did. I ran Diskwarrior (version 3 not 4 but I doubt that mattered) and it got errors when it would scan for the hard drives. I rebooted from the DW CD, and it crashed and rebooted itself.

A while ago I had something similar happen where the enclosure died, and when I got a new enclosure it worked. So, I cracked open the new drive's enclosure, and this one was a SATA drive, so I stuck it in the mac instead of buying a new box for it. Anyway, there's no hard drive icon, but Disk Utility is showing the drive if I let it sit for a long time to think about it. It just shows the drive itself and doesn't have another icon under it with the drive's name, the way my main drive is set up, and the name is all in red. It says the drive is failing and back up what i can asap. Well I can't back anything up if I can't mount it :(

So, anyone have any ideas? I can go buy a new external to back up the stuff onto, if I can just get to it. I know the data is there because the last time I was able to browse the drive I saw everything and it was all working, I just couldn't write to the drive.

Also for my system info, I'm running OS 10.4.11 on a dual 2ghz G5 (the original one). My main drive works fine, I have this drive connected as the 2nd drive now. Again I tried Diskwarrior and also something called Boomerang, neither seemed to do anything...

[timkline]

Oh, the error diskwarrior gives before it crashes is "2,1" if that means anything.....