[Laminar]

I have a WD MyBook 500GB external HD partitioned into two pieces: One HFS+ for Time Machine and one FAT32 for file storage. I got a couple random "Backup has failed" errors in Time Machine, so I decided to have Disk Utility repair the time machine volume. I started the repair, left, then came back about two hours later to find that it was still "repairing." I don't remember exactly what it was saying, but messages were scrolling within the Disk Utility window pretty quickly - bad blocks maybe? I force quit Disk Utility and a few minutes later my C2D mini kernel panicked. This happens once a week or so, I'm pretty sure it's bad RAM I installed when I first bought it a year ago. Upon restarting, fsck_hfs started running, taking 90-100% of a CPU, and the hard drive failed to mount. I unplugged it and plugged it back in, and it still failed to mount, but a separate instance of fsck_hfs started up, so now I have two instances of fsck_hfs taking up about 150% of my CPU power.

The hard drive is only six months old. I know it's not a Seagate, but the price was right in the time frame I needed it. Is the drive dead? What else can I do?

[Laminar]

Also, I'm not sure if it's related, but I've noticed a couple quirks since the kernel panic - Safari lost my window settings - I had to resize it and re-add the status bar. Also, I have a Pandora webclip in my dashboard that wasn't being responsive, so I closed the widget, but it continued to play for an hour or two.

[Laminar]

So I killed both instances of fsck, and it told me that the drive couldn't be fixed, so it was mounted the drive as read-only so that i could pull all of my data off of it. I ran Disk Utility on the HFS volume and, although it took a long time to run, claimed the volume was okay.

[Laminar]

Also, it appears that Time Machine is writing to it now, so somewhere along the line it became write-able.