[Ixion]

Recently, I've upgraded my little Rev A Powerbook G4 12" yet again from a 60GB Toshiba to a new 100GB Samsung. I also added a new stick of 1GB of ram bringing me to 1.12Gb, which is fantastic I might add, but besides the point.

I installed a brand new copy of Tiger and started setting things up after carefully installing the new hard disk. I placed the 60GB Toshiba into a Coolmax Combo External Enclosure. I connected the external via FW400 and it seemed to work alright. After a while, however, the system started bogging down to complete halts and my little Powerbook was completely and utterly unresponsive. After a few restarts, I transfered on the order of 5GB and finally, it just quit working all together. It seemed to go down hill after my Powerbook went to sleep while my disk was still mounted. When I woke it back up, it said that the disk had been removed too hastily and that I was going to burn in hell.

When I connect the External to my Powerbook now, it does either one of two things. It can either not recognize any mountable file systems on my disk or it will freeze Finder like nobody's business. I've tried running Repair through DiskUtility and manually running verify and repair through the terminal. Little luck on either fronts. I've gotten it to mount successfully once in the last week, and not even my tried and true copy of Data Rescue even works. It either doesn't recognize the device, or ends up not responding while trying to gather device information.

Thinking that possibly there was some physical damage to the device, I've even tried placing the disk in the freezer in an air-tight bag with no success. That trick has worked for me in the past, but I don't think the damage was physical.

I feel as though I'm doomed.

Please help.

[seanc]

My external firewire hdd often gets into this mess doing exactly as you have described. The only way i've discovered ton repair it at this time is to remove it from the external enclosure, put it in a windows pc, install mac drive, mount the drive and then when I put it back in the external enclosure it works fine.

I agree this is not practical but it has worked for me so far, maybe you'll have some luck.

[Ixion]

I had some luck mounting the disk in single user mode, but it would stop responding after a few minutes. I ended up attempting to install Tiger over it, and through the install, it made it to installing Spanish (almost toward the very end) and quit responding. I paniced and restarted the system and booted into the internal hard disk. My external hard disk magically mounted normally, only everything on the disk was gone, save for the only directory I car about, /Users . Odd, but, it works for me.