My immediate problem: I have a 1TB external hard drive (Maxtor/firewire) that will not mount, so not only can I not recover the data on it (not critical as I have another drive with the same data on it), but I cannot even find a way to verify, repair, partition, erase, zero it out or do anything to return it to a useful state.
When I connect it to a computer, sometimes it gives the message "This drive is unreadable" and the options to initialize, ignore or eject it. When I choose initialize it opens Disk Utility and the drive shows up in the drive list, although no volume does. If I try to partition or erase it, using any scheme of partitioning or formatting options, I get the message: "Partitioning failed: Input/Output error." And that's where I'm stuck. I do not believe the drive has physically crashed. It does spin up, the right lights come on, etc. I can hear it trying to find something to connect to, but it fails. I suspect the failure is related to some problems I've been having with the computer it was connected to -- frequent kernel panics and forced shutdowns, etc. -- and that key directory data on it has become so fundamentally corrupted that it won't mount or allow reformatting. Does anyone know of a utility that might be able to "see" this drive and do a low-level format or something equivalent to that? Dan Crutcher
