Buggered Harddrive

[0098386]

Well. I've been editing a video for a university project on my external HDD at home like. Only I thought I'd show my lecturer what I'm doing so I took my PowerBook and external drive into uni. plugged everything in. rendered my vid. it was taking so long that he went home (i mean a 5 hour render is pretty mad). Only the system froze up.

I hold down the old power button and force a shutdown, turn off and unplug the external drive (firewire, btw) and lug everything home. I'm back now. I just plugged everything back in for the first time and oh dear.

"Drive is unreadable on this system" with an option to initialise, ignore or eject. The drive is not showing on my system - both the partitions of the same physical drive.

What can I do here? I'm thinking about plugging it into my desktop PC downstairs to see if that can read the files. If so I'd probably just backup them files back afterwards.

Have I lost everything? That means my whole 16gb iTunes library is gone and some other bits n bobs

 

[Queso]

Hmmmm......oh dear. I think something along the lines of DiskWarrior would sort this, but in the absence of that, try the following:-

Insert the drive, and click Ignore when prompted. Open a Terminal and type

df

to get a list of disk partitions the system can see. Your drive should be listed in there amongst your internal OSX drive and other stuff, as the system sees a partition but can't mount it. You should be able to see which is the right one from the sizes given.

Now run

fsck_hfs /dev/<your partition name>

which will HOPEFULLY repair the errors in your partition. Once it's finished, you need to re-mount the disk to see if your files are still there.

Can't guarantee this will work, but it's the first thing I would try if it happened to me.