external firewire drive got whacked. aaahhh-HELP ME!

oh the irony. while backing up my 60gb external FW back-up drive, it got trashed. don't know how... here are the details:

speedmetal FW+USB case
60GB seagate drive (refurb- bad idea)

was backing up about 55 gb of images (i am a designer) to a second drive. i think i made a mistake and sent the data to a drive smaller than the amount of data i was moving. normally, this action should be dis-allowed, but the mac just started copying the files over. after a huge amount of time, i got a disk error msg. went to the 60gb back-up drive and and it said 55 of 60 gb used, 0 files! what!? it now fails to mount 99 out of 100 times, usually hangs the finder in os 9 and os x and when it does appear to mount i am disllowed access (erroe -35) and diskwarrior, disc doctor, tech tool, etc. don't see it so they can't fix it.

right after the first screw up i was able to mount it via usb only (not fw) in os9 and tech tool pro told me the allocation file (and several others i don't recall) were failed. have never been able to properly mount of test it again since then. even with disc warrior.

any help? anyone? i am encouraged by the "55 gigs used" i saw just after the drive failed, but i just can't get to the drive of any folders in it. any ideas will be great! sorry for the long read....

I am a little confused here. You have about 55GB of data to back up. You are trying to make a back up of this data on another disk drive. What is the size of the drive you were trying to back up to? Do you still have a copy of the original data?

Repair permissions. if that doesnt work, you may need to reformat the drive.

i think so...

rman said:

I am a little confused here. You have about 55GB of data to back up. You are trying to make a back up of this data on another disk drive. What is the size of the drive you were trying to back up to? Do you still have a copy of the original data?

Click to expand...

yes. the data being copied was about 55 gigs.

i have another back-up drive of 250 gb and it is partitioned into a large and small section. i think what happened is that i dragged the 55 gb drive items to the small partition by accident and so the copy process ran out of space (shouldn't it have been disallowed?). i was pondering that perhaps this prompted the freak-out of the refurbed 60gig drive (containing the 55gb of data). i have a funny feeling it was already on its way out. sorry if i am being confusing. i'm very flustered. bah. humbug.

Has your system been rebooted, since you had the problem?

booted

rman said:

Has your system been rebooted, since you had the problem?

Click to expand...

oh yeah, about 100 times. at first i thought it was just one of thoswe funny firewire moments, so when i realized only about 10gigs had been backed up before the disk error, i rebooted the computer and then the 60gb disk decided to never really mount again. i've booted in several os 9's, a coupla osx versions, diskwarrior and tech tool (i think) also have booted off my external system backup FW drive. disk seems to only ever show over usb in sytem 9.2 (direct boot, not classic)

how do you repair permissions?

You goto Disk Utility in the Utilities folder, choose the volume and click Repair Permissions.