09-07-2008, 12:00 AM

I have an 250GB segate ide usb external harddrive that I used for timemachine, and all was well, until one day I was reformatting it and half way through writing the partition map my girlfriend closed my macbook... I've tried everything in the books to repair the hd but nothing has worked.. I've used apples, microsofts and unbuntus boots cds, disk utility, disk management, Norton partition magic 7, but nothing can fix it... (I ruled out that it was the external case/wiring by replacing it with a different harddrive which worked fine) &&& I dont know much about hdd's but its set to master, (I dont remeber if I had changed that or if it was working before like that)..

Its become a life goal to get this danm thing to work without paying retail price to fix it... heres a shot of it in disk utility, it took 20minutes after I plugged it in to show but, no option to do anything to it..



Please let me know if someones had this problem before, and what they did to resolve it,

Or if someone wants to help me make this dream come true and help me one on one I'm willing to dish out some money for your time,

thank you in advanced

09-07-2008, 09:51 AM

i see you said you used an MS boot cd, but did you simply hook it to a windows machine and try to reformat fat32? if you can get it there, it will likely be able to be reformatted again as HFS+.

09-07-2008, 09:57 AM

You say you have tried to repair the disk, I guess you have done this already - but have you tried an erase rather than repair?

09-07-2008, 10:01 AM

Do you simply want to reformat it or are you trying to repair the disk?

09-07-2008, 10:16 AM

good catch guys - i was assuming repair meant to just get it to work, not repair so the old info was usable.

09-07-2008, 11:31 PM

yeah I just want the danm thing to work, I don't care about the data lol,

I've tried, repairing, reformatting and erasing, I have plugged it directly into my windows machine without the usb, it didn't pick up on it (everything in the bios was set to read it, again i used a different disk to make sure it wasn't me being dumb).. on both plateforms the computer wont boot or shutdown when the disk is pluged in (usb or directly into the computer), today I did some more work to it in disk utility and kept on getting errors

disk erase - http://www.file2go.net/files/6b2b74f...0de55e3b98.png
first aid - http://www.file2go.net/files/355592b...24ebe42540.png
repair disk - http://www.file2go.net/files/3a5c815...5e13f0383e.png
partition - http://www.file2go.net/files/b142f32...7ccf40252e.png

and yeah, once in a while it does show up on a MS machine (not in mycomputer but in disk managment) and I try to format it but I get hit with errors (I forget the errors and when I tired yesterday windows xp didn't read the disk (even after 2hours))

Thanks for your help so far

09-07-2008, 11:43 PM

Personally I would put it on a Linux machine, and see if it shows up under /dev/ . The device should be visible under /dev/sda1 or something similar. With the partition table messed up, it will probably not show a number, only /dev/sda or /dev/sdb etc. This would confirm that the disk is still viable. Then I would reformat the disk using fdisk and then a mkfs.

09-07-2008, 11:49 PM

I used ubuntu's 7.1 live cd, and in the select disk thing the disk wasn't readable/listed there, is that an indication that it wont be readable. I don't have a windows machine at my disposal.. oh wait, bootcamp can run ubuntu right?

Also if it matter, the externals output is firewire, and I'm putting it in usb, because thats the only wire it originally came with (firewire to usb).

09-07-2008, 11:53 PM

I am talking about using the command line to actually search the /dev directory for the drive, and then using command line tools to fix it. I have never used Ubuntu before, so I can't comment on their graphical stuff.

09-08-2008, 10:15 PM

To the OP:

Go to the Seagate web site and download their latest version of disk diagnostics to your Windows machine. The diagnostics program will make either a bootable CD or 3.5" floppy disk that can be used to check the drive. It may even work directly from Windows. Attach the drive to your Windows machine and run the Seagate diagnostics.

It could be when she closed the lid the drive may have suddenly stopped and caused a hardware problem. If the drive is still under warranty, using the Seagate diagnostics will tell if it's repairable with software or if it should be RMA back to Seagate.

Regards.