Before I kill all my drives..

I have an external that would not mount on OS 10.4. Little did I know but my harddrive was dying and a friend reformatted and updated my system to Leopard.

I am wondering if I should try and see if the external will mount. The reason I don't just go ahead and do it is because I read somewhere that I could possible kill any hope of it working again if I keep trying to make it work.

If it does mount, what is the best way to get the information off it and transfer it to the new external? I had tried a while ago to move all the files to another drive but only got a little done because it was taking so long. Then it just refused to mount anymore.

G'day and welcome to the Forums. It is a great place.

If your external drive mounts and it is Firewire, give SuperDuper a go. Will take a number of hours so be patient. If it backs up okay, consider registering SuperDuper as Smart BackUp really flies.

Before you start make sure the external drive is reformatted to Apple Partition Map and depending on your machine model, the drive will then be bootable and available for selection under Startup Disk

USB, even USB2 is too slow