My external harddrive is asking to initiate.

[MAGICMAN320]

My mac has been acting very weird since i installed leopard and ilife 3 weeks ago.
1. Running slow (taking a long time to open programs)
2. Sometimes when i click on my external drive icon its empty.
3. Grey screeen comes on telling me to restart.
4. Starts making a loud fan noise when i leave it on for a over 24hrs.

Then this morning i turned it on to copy a file to my jumpdrive and i click on the external (seagate 250) drive and again its no icons or anything inside.
So i go to spotlight to see if i can type in the name of the file and no file is found. But i did notice that it said "indexing"

So i waited for 3 minutes. Then i did what i always do when it starts bugging out. "restart"
After the restart it ask me would i like to initiate the disk drive or something to that affect.
Please dont tell me my external is fried. I have tons and tons of work on it.

 

[sushi]

Something is definitely wrong with your external HD.

Is the HD drive spinning up?

If so, when you launch Disk Utilities, does the external HD show up?

If so, what happens if you select Repair Disk under the First Aid tab?

 

[MAGICMAN320]

Yes. I hear it moving i guess. same as before.
Yes. It shows up in the disk utility


First Aid failed:
Disk Utility stopped repairing “disk2s10” because the following error was encountered:

Filesystem verify or repair failed.

Verify and Repair volume “disk2s10”
Checking Non-journaled HFS Plus volume.
Catalog file entry not found for extent
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.


Its weird, the same thing happened to my seagat 6gb thumbdrive last week.

 

[MAGICMAN320]

There ae two icons in the disk utility. One says 232.9gb seagate freeaagent desktop media
then underneath it it says disk2s10

I highlighted the bottom one first and it gave me that failed notice
Then i tried the top one and it seems to be running something..

Wow...The weirdest thing of it all,
Im asking the machine that screwed it up to now fix it. Cool.

 

[MAGICMAN320]

Yep..Failed as well.

 

[sushi]

You mentioned this:

I have tons and tons of work on it.

Recovering a drive can be tricky. There are numerous tools out there that you can use such as Disk Warrior. There are also places that you can send your HD where they will attempt to recover information from the HD.

Another option, since the disk is rotating, if you have a PC that you can use/borrow that you can connect the external HD to, then I would suggest giving SpinRite a shot.

Note, it is possible that there is something wrong with your Mac. You might want to do a hardware check to see if everything is okay. I've had faulty motherboards before that were corrupting my hard drives. As I understand, something was wrong with the hardware drivers (ports) that the hard drives were connected to. You mention that you have slower boot times. It could also be that your install of Leopard was bad. Happens rarely, but does somethings -- especially if doing an upgrade rather than a clean install.