External FW Hard Drive not mounting- weird problem

[Chiro75]

I'll try to keep this as short as possible.

I have an older (5 years) FW enclosure for 3.5" HD's. Used a 10GB drive in it forever and it always worked fine. Bought a 250GB Seagate. Put it in the enclosure and it only read 1/2 of the capacity. Found some articles online explaining this.

Bought what I thought was a new FW enclosure, but it was USB 2.0, which I don't have. I use iBook 933mHz G4 with 10.4.8. Out of curiosity, I put the drive in my USB enclosure and put it on my PC with XP, and it read 250GB. Put it back in the FW enclosure and on the iBook it also read 250GB!

Used it some and once it hung the computer up. Restarted, and it wouldn't mount, wouldn't show up. Put it in the other enclosure, and there it was! Put it back in the FW, and again, there it was! Happened again recently and I have since sold the other enclosure since I would have had to use SLOW USB1.

When I start it up it grinds like it normally does, but nothing shows up on the iBook. It just isn't there, including disk utility, etc. I have used mount and automount in the Terminal, reset NVRAM, reset PRAM, shut down unplugged and removed battery for 10 minutes, etc etc. Nothing helps.

Is it my FW enclosure? ANy other ideas? Thanks in advance!

 

[Chiro75]

OK, update!

I opened Disk Utility and the HD shows up again reading 128GB only. The actual named volume or whatever is grayed out, though. The "verify disk permissions" and "repair disk permissions" are grayed out, too. If I click "verify disk" or "repair disk", it says:

Invalid number of allocation blocks
Volume check failed.
Error: the underlying task reported failure on exit

If I click on the named volume or whatever you call what you actually named the hard drive, it says that it is not mounted, so I can't do anything else to the disk.

Is this because I "tricked" the iBook into thinking it is 250GB when the enclosure can only handle half of that? If I buy a new enclosure that can handle large capacity, will the disk work okay again or do I need to erase it and reformat all over again, no matter what I do? Or is this a problem with the disk?

 

[Chiro75]

OK, well, glad I didn't wait for any help on this one! I ended up buying a new enclosure on eBay that specifically said it would work with high capacity HD's. I installed the 250GB HD in it and it works like a charm, no problem. So, the problem was that the old enclosure bridge just wasn't up to speed.