I've had a Seagate FreeAgent 500GB external hard drive for a little over a year, and its just about to give up the ghost. Initially I made 3 different partitions: A BackUp partition for Time Machine, a Media Partition (songs, pics, etc) and a Share partition that would be available for my PC to connect to. About 9 months ago, the BackUp partition croaked; Time Machine told me that there was an error on the disk. When I tried to repair it with Disk Utility, it couldn't do it. Obviously, I was frustrated about the whole thing, but since I didn't anticipate needing any of those back-up files, I just set Time Machine to back-up to the Media Partition and moved on.
Now, about 4 months ago, my secondary computer, an iMac G5, wouldn't boot (this was the computer that the external hard drive has been connected to). Fortunately, we have a powerbook that we've been using all summer instead. But, now that I have a little free time, I'm trying to recover my computer. I think I have that nut cracked, but in the process, I discovered that my external hard drive is having a lot of issues.
My Share partition is no longer available (just like the old Back Up partition) and the Media partition is accessible, but in Finder, there aren't any files. Disk Utility can't do anything for either of the drives, although it recognizes that there are 808,000 files on the Media partition. Disk Warrior was also no help.
The error that disk utility reports - and I think this is key - is that the drive cannot be unmounted. Also, I must force eject the drives always; it no longer properly ejects.
All this, and a little google research, lead me to believe that the hard drives might be fine, but its the interface board, etc in the External drive housing that's causing my problems.
I'm planning to disassemble the external hard drive, and connect the harddrive itself with a SATA-USB, and try recovering them that way.
Does that sound reasonable? Any other suggestions?
Thanks!!
Now, about 4 months ago, my secondary computer, an iMac G5, wouldn't boot (this was the computer that the external hard drive has been connected to). Fortunately, we have a powerbook that we've been using all summer instead. But, now that I have a little free time, I'm trying to recover my computer. I think I have that nut cracked, but in the process, I discovered that my external hard drive is having a lot of issues.
My Share partition is no longer available (just like the old Back Up partition) and the Media partition is accessible, but in Finder, there aren't any files. Disk Utility can't do anything for either of the drives, although it recognizes that there are 808,000 files on the Media partition. Disk Warrior was also no help.
The error that disk utility reports - and I think this is key - is that the drive cannot be unmounted. Also, I must force eject the drives always; it no longer properly ejects.
All this, and a little google research, lead me to believe that the hard drives might be fine, but its the interface board, etc in the External drive housing that's causing my problems.
I'm planning to disassemble the external hard drive, and connect the harddrive itself with a SATA-USB, and try recovering them that way.
Does that sound reasonable? Any other suggestions?
Thanks!!