External Hard Drive Won't Mount

I have a Seagate Freeagent 500GB external hard drive that uses FAT32 format. It shows up in the disk utility, but I can't read or access the files. After trying to repair it I get "coud not read boot/block (input/output error)" then it says the hard drive could not be repaired.

It worked fine until yesterday then just stopped showing up in the Finder.

I'm using Snow Lepord, 10.6.8 on a macbook pro.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Do you have a PC handy that you can use? If you do, attach the drive to the PC. If it mounts on the PC, open a command prompt and type in "chkdsk \f" and the drive letter. Sometimes a FAT-32 drive that can't be repaired by Disk Utility can be repaired by the Windows Check Disk utility.

Similar problem on a PC. I can't see the drive anywhere but when I go to safely remove hardware it's there. I did run chkdsk in the comand prompt but that didn't help.

If both Disk Utility and Check Disk can't repair the drive, it's likely failed. You may be able to get your data from it with software but that's not a guaranty.

You can give Disk Warrior 4 a try: LINK

So I did look at Disk warrior but it doesn't support FAT 32.

Do you know of any other programs that might work?

Yes, try the free "Recuva", download from here. Note: It's a Windows program which I have used before and it works real well. Just download it to your PC, attach the drive and see what it can find.