External hard drive not mounting

[uberboe]

I was using my usb hard drive earlier today just fine but after plugging it in again it will not mount. When I plug it in it lights up and I can hear the disk spinning. The fsck_hfs process also uses 50%+ of my cpu. It does appears in System Profiler and Data Rescue 3 but not in Disk Utility. Restarting does not help.

Are there any solutions?

 

[Poncho]

If you have access to another Mac try plugging it into that. If not, try plugging it into a different USB socket. Next, try another USB lead if you have a spare.
Next, you have to try and access the external Hard Drive's directory and see if it is corrupted.

Choose Quick Scan on Data Rescue 3 and see if it can scan and read the directory. If so , this is good.

Disk Warrior will also try to do this. If it can see the corrupt directory it will build a copy of it and if you are happy with it you can get it to replace the corrupted one with the new one and hopefully access your data.

Download from here (assuming you are running s leopard): http://mac.softpedia.com/get/System-Utilities/DiskWarrior.shtml

I am also assuming this will give you a trial of the software.

Tell us what you see.....

 

[uberboe]

Alright, the problem seems to have fixed itself. I just left the drive in for a while and it mounted and reads fine. Thanks anyway.

 

[Poncho]

Cool, but you might want to go to Disk utility and click repair disk. This will scan the directory and repair it so it should mount and be recognised quickly next time. Do this just in case the directory is becoming a bit ragged.