unable to reapair external disk, unmount error - Page 2

ElDiabloConCaca · #10 June 25th, 2008, 03:28 PM

That is very strange. Got some other things that you may want to try:

1) Try repairing each partition individually. Instead of clicking on the device in Disk Utility (the non-indented device listing, which has your partitions listed in an indented fashion below), click on the partition that's giving you trouble and repair each partition individually.
2) Boot from your OS X Install CD/DVD, launch Disk Utility from the "Installer" or "Utilities" menu, and see if your drive will repair that way.

imajoebob · #11 July 23rd, 2008, 12:28 PM

I've had the same problem, and ended up having to use Disk Warrior to recover the files onto another drive, toast the uncooperative drive, reformat, and move the recovered files back to the reformatted drive.

It's not fast - even on Firewire. I let it run overnight for a 60GB drive. DW will let you set up a logical disk on the desktop to inspect the recovered files before toasting the bad drive. You should see the entire folder structure, except the possibility of a few corrupted files. If you don't like the way it looks, abort and try again.

Of course you need a drive as large as the files you want to recover, since it ddoesn't do any compression . It's a recovery tool, not a backup. I don't know if youi can use the logical partition on the same drive. I'd see if DW has any info on this, but not take the chance it it doesn't.

Drives are fairly cheap (<20¢ a GB), and USB 2.0 cases are dirt cheap. My preference is the Galaxy Metal Gear II. I get the combo USB/Firewire, but my ancient Titanium has USB 1.1. I'm going to buy another this week, because my crappy generic FW case croaked, and one drive won't mount. So I need qa new box to recover the drive's files. You can get a monster drive and case for less than $100 - or even cheaper for a smaller drive, and you've got added security of independent drives which you can always use to back each other up.