External Firewire disk won't map

[Red Bear]

Hi,
since a few days I have problems mapping my external firewire disk. It's a 250GB disk that I had partitioned into two halfs using Windows XP. I use it with my XP PC and my iBook. I used to connect it sometimes using firewire, sometimes using USB2.0. Since a few days sometime only the second partition is mapped, sometimes none at all. In the disk utility it first recognized the 2 partitions. But it shows the one that wouldn't map as not active and for the same reason it says it could not be repaired.

When I connect it to the Windows XP PC and use Partition Magic, it does not map the disk but shows the whole disk as unpartitioned.

Any idea what could have caused this and how to repair it?

Thanks a lot in advance.
Bernd

 

[candelabro]

reinstall osx?

 

[Red Bear]

Hi,
first I thought you were joking ... then after getting more frustrated about this I gave it a try but to no avail. Still only the second partition of the external Firewire hard disk is mounted.
Any other suggestion are highly welcome. Thanks.
Bernd

 

[candelabro]

I had not exactly the same problem but my 250 la cie partitionned in three disks didn´t mount anymore on my macbook, same time I couldn´t read disks on the superdrive anymore. I reinstalled the mac osx and everything worked fine then. I read on apple support the technical service of apple asked to reinstall osx in order to solve some troubleshooting situations.

But, as my bad habits of just disconnecting the firewire drive without to eject it produced another not-mounting-anymore situation, I had to use "data rescue", buying it on line in the middle of the night, after I could confirm it would save some files. I saved some 60 gb!
And I can say "Thanks, Data Rescue!"...
Then I formatted it again, in extended journaled, but with "guid" configuration specific for intel chip. I didn´t wanted fat32 because of posible viruses in the future...
And I promess I will send the disks to be ejected before to pull the cable out...
I finally have lost some 30 gb of data that I had no place to transfer.
30 gb is a lot of work in my case, so take care of your backups too...

Just my two cents

 

[vsl405]

I just discovered this board and I'm going to piggyback on your issue. I just bought a Seagate 200GB and can't figure out how to initialize the disk to get rid of the fat32 file. The Seagate instructions say to choose initialize in Disk Utility, but I don't even see that option in the program. I also can't find the tab to select a partitioning option.

This is what I did:
1) Mounted Seagate drive via USB
2) Opened Disk Utility, went to Erase Tab, selected Seagate drive & clicked Erase. I didn't choose or enter any other options.

Was I suppose to choose some other format before I erased the disk? Is it safe to back up my data on this disk now? I have saved about 10GB of photos on the drive & the files are accessible. But I'm paranoid that I didn't format the disk correctly. Can someone please confirm if what I did sounds right?

candalbro- I'm so glad to hear your experience with data rescue. I'm trying to get this Seagate up and running so I can recover my iphoto library which I accidentally deleted last week!