Mac Partition Problem

My friend and I have been trying to fix his external hard drive. While it was partioning, the computer actually crashed resulting in one of his partitions being corrupt. It was in the HFS+ filesystem. His other partition was FAT32 which was fine. Is there anyway to recover these files on the HFS+ system? I have tried Data Rescue 3 and it claims to have recovered these files but when actually coming to play the music or video, it doesn't actually work. He has backed these 'files' up on another hard drive.

He has then deleted this corrupted partition. Then tried to repartition to FAT32 but then iPartition crashed resulting in some file titles to be converted to gibberish and cannot be read or played. This has resulted in data loss of his music collection into the tens of thousands. So yeah...any helpful advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Any particular reason as to why you're using iPartition? Why not just use Disk Utility to create and manage partitions? Disk Partition comes with Mac OS, it's in the Utilities folder (or just use spotlight)

Disk Utility even provides some sort of disk repair, you can give that a try. iPartition might have some repair functions as well, never used it though.

It would be best to try and find the source of the initial crash, was the computer being used for something else? Like trying to copy files while partitioning?

Well I did try to use Disk Utility but all the options were grayed out. I'll try it again. Nothing was happening while the iPartition was running.

A possible reason the options were grayed out is that you may have been trying to use Disk Utility while the drive was mounted. You have to boot from your install recovery DVD and run Disk Utility from there. If that's not the reason, you may have a defective drive.

Regards.

good point chscag!

although this seems like a case of an external drive, so he can just unmount it without having to boot from installs. Only need to boot form installs to screw around with the boot disk

valid point indeed, should have mentioned that