External HDD wont mount

I have a Seagate HDD in an Ultra enclosure that connects via firewire to my mac. The other day I had it connected with no problems and was downloading a big file to it. However, the power went off and on a few times. When I checked on it last (power was on) both the Mac (MacBook, so it stayed booted up while the power was out) and the enclosure were on, but the HDD was not mounted on the desktop so I turned it off and decided to deal with it later.

Now when I plug in the HDD is sounds like its accessing the data and the light flashes, but it does that for a minute or two and then stops without mounting to the desktop. If I go into the "About This Mac" thing it shows up under the firewire section. Unfortunately the MB is my only Mac I can test this drive out on. Is there any setting I can try to reset so it'll mount? Or did the enclosure most likely fail?

Thanks.

Oh, I'm running Leopard 10.5.2. I also tried plugging it in via USB with the same result.

can you see it in disk utility, can your run repair disk from hat app?

louishen said:

can you see it in disk utility, can your run repair disk from hat app?

Click to expand...

I tried that and it said keys out of order and then "reconfiguring B-tree" or something like that and then the repair fails. Should I start up with the startup disc and do disk utility that way?

I disassembled the enclosure (slow day at work) and everything appears normal physically (I don't know exactly what I was looking for, but nothing was fried). I'm going to try to take it to the store I got my MB from and see if they can tell anything, although they probably don't have a tech there on Saturdays so keep the troubleshootings coming

weeeeeird. So here's when I think the HDD died. The other day I was downloading a torrent to the drive (an external drive with its own power) and the power at the house went out for a few minutes and then came back. Then it went out a few minutes later and came back again. I think it did this a few more times judging from the times on the clocks when I got home from work (I left for work after it came on the second time). So since the computer (a laptop, so it stayed powered) was writing to the disk when the power went out, it must have messed something up.

Here's the really weird part. The HDD showed up in the Mac's disk utilities app, but I couldn't repair it so I brought it in to the store I got my macbook from and they put the drive in two different computers and said it wouldn't mount in them either (same problem as on my mac) and he said he could hear it spinning but couldn't hear the head moving. So I take it back home, plug it in, doesn't mount. I boot the computer from the install disk so I can run disk utilities without any other programs running, still can't be repaired. So since I'm going to have to send it in for warranty anyways I decide to click the erase button. It goes for 10 seconds, and then says the disk is erased. I'm like "***?" and I go to the verify/repair section, and it says the disk is now ok.

I boot up the computer completely and the drive mounts, but now its empty. Luckily I didn't do the secure erase so I'm going to try to find some application with which I can retrieve the data.

IT sounds like there is nothing wrong with the drive, if the B-tree couldn.t be repaired then it is the software information about locations on the drive that became corrupted. Erasing the drive just created a blank drive with a clean B-tree

louishen said:

IT sounds like there is nothing wrong with the drive, if the B-tree couldn.t be repaired then it is the software information about locations on the drive that became corrupted. Erasing the drive just created a blank drive with a clean B-tree

Click to expand...

I've had StellarPhoenix running for quite a few hours now (had a family emergency, hence the late post) and so far it has scanned 115GB's of the 500GB drive, then I have to figure out where to save all the recovered info to so that I can transfer it back onto the drive (since I doubt I can recover it and save it to the same HDD at the same time).

The only thing I haven't seen show up on the list of file types is a disk image, but it was labeled Z1, so it may be the last thing to show up

So StellarPhoenix has been running for 20 hours and its searched 17.2 million sectors of 122 million total sectors....this is going to take a while