I/O error

[bacteriologist]

Hi, my boot disk encountered trouble when using Safari. It suddenly crashed and never booted. I installed OSX 1 on the Firewire Lacie and booted to run the Disk Utility. It found no problems. But when I try to erase or re-partition the HD, it cannot do it since it is not mounting the disk in the computer. I used the startup Unix window fsck –y to check and it says ok, but when I type mount / it says ‘Input/Output error’. When I boot from the firewire via OS 9.2, the disk is mounted but cannot format even with the Diskerase or by TechTool Pro 3.07. I am willing to format the disk and reinstall the programs, but I am unable to access the disk. Please tell me if theres any program like TechTool or Diskwarrior that can fix this problem. Help me plleeeease!!!

 

[immdb]

Have you tried starting up using the OS X install disc. You can access Disk Utility from there uder the file menu (I think that is where it is) or you may be able to use the erase and install option via the OS X installer. Maybe one of those will see the drive.

 

[bacteriologist]

Hi, thanks for your advice. When I booted with the OSX CD, it does not show this disk at all, so I tried to boot from a firewire to fix this, but it does not work as the disk is not mounted.

 

[immdb]

I believe in OS 9 you would use Drive Setup to format a drive. Have you tried Drive Setup?
If not, go to the menu item "Functions", select "Initialization Options" and then "Low level Format". If it will let you start the format don't cancel it, it will take a LONG time to format a drive of several gigabytes. I would start it and then go to bed.

 

[bacteriologist]

Hi, thanks again. I went to the Function-Intialization options. But strangely the Low level formatting option is gray and not available for formatting. But the 'zero all data' option is available. Unfortunately, initialization failed. Do you think that the hard disk has gone bad. In the Unix window, after checking for errors, the disk failed to mount due to I/O error.

 

[immdb]

It seems to me that there are times that certain operations can access the drive (ie., when you used the "fsck -y" command, and Disk Utility's Repair Disk option).

I would try a third party formatting utility like Micromat Drive 10 or FWB Hard Disk Toolkit and see if it can see the drive to format it. I've seen Drive 10 recover so called "dead" drives when other utilities couldn't touch them.

If you have the time and resources, your persistence may just pay off.