Firewire External HD no longer recognized

[Alexander]

I have a Cube with an additional external firewire drive.

i keep the system running for weeks on end, however today when switching between user logins the drive comes up as uninitializzed drive and it asked to be initialized.

I'm running under OS X and that's where it was created. I think it is the HFS+ filesystem.

This is a critical disk so I didn't want to play around.

Any sage advice?

-Alex

[dlloyd]

Did you try shutting the computer down, disconnecting the drive, restarting the computer, and then reconnecting the drive when you get to the Desktop? This might work, because I find that applications and accessories sometimes 'go crazy' and need a fresh reboot to work properly. I don't know if this is the same thing, but my old Performa's hard drive used to do this, and the Disk Check utillity said that it was on the way out. Something to do with a corrupted drive tree, or something of that sort.

[edX]

my own experience is that external firewire recognition problems reside with your system disk most of the time. running a good repair program like diskwarrior, techtool pro or drive 10 should solve the issue. if not, then you definitly need diskwarrior which must run in os 9. boot and launch diskwarrior before plugging in the questionable drive. diskwarrior should then recognise it and be able to repair it.

[Alexander]

I found the problem and can reproduce it. If you have the external plugged in and the go into classic and hit rebuild desktop, it renders the drive useless.

If I then restart the system in classic, the drive is back. Then it is again available in OS X.

-Alex