I suggest a recovery attempt with DiskWarrior.app before trying to overwrite/reformat the drive. --russ
On Jul 28, 2007, at 8:16 PM, Dan Crutcher wrote: > 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
