External Hard Drive Problems

Hi, I'm having a problem with a Freecom 250GB external hard drive that I'm using on my 2GHz Core Duo Macbook (512MB RAM and 60GB hard drive).

When I first got the drive it was preformatted to FAT32 which I use for a while until it started having problems being seen by my mac, and then some data got corrupted. A friend suggested I removed the data on it and reformat it to Mac OSX extended (journaled). This I did and it was working fine up until this morning. I booted my mac, turned the drive on and loaded iTunes to play some music off it and iTunes locked up and then the drive ejected itself.

Now it is still seen by my mac and disk utility, but everytime I try and access any of the files, or even try and open the drive, Finder locks up, or the drive just ejects itself and I get the improper removal warning . When Finder locks up the only way to sort it seems to be either forcing the macbook to shutdown, or turning off the power to the drive. I've also tried using First Aid in disk utility but then disk utility locks up!!

Fortunately there is nothing significantly important on there, just music and photos, but I'd like to be able to back them up to DVD so I don't end up losing everything!

Any help/suggestions are welcome, thanks.

Hi Thaw, sorry to hear that you are having troubles. It sounds like this disk is definitely flawed, and should be replaced. In the meantime however, you want to recover your data I am sure, and perhaps even the drive itself. I would recommend two utilities - unfortunately both are commercial products, which means you will have to pay for them.

The first is Disk Warrior, a sort of swiss army knife of disk tools. Highly regarded, and should be able to help you determine what is wrong with the drive. See:

http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior

The second is Intech's SpeedTools. This is also a great suite of disk related tools. See:

http://www.speedtools.com/STUS.shtml

Hopefully one of these two may be able to help you! Good Luck!

...oh, and WELCOME to Mac Forums!

Thanks for the tips. I've managed to get the Hard Drive mounted once long enough for me to back up the music and photos on it to DVD. Since then though it's just been mounting and then the disc stops spinning and the drive ejects itself. I might have to return it and see if I can get a replacement.

Thanks again!