Volume Not Recognized on External FireWire Drive

[Canarsie]

I have a 100-gigabyte Ultra ATA hard disk drive manufactured by Maxtor but purchased as a ClubMac external FireWire hard disk drive from a few years ago. It is a Maxtor 536DX 5400 RPM hard disk drive, model #4W100H6, manufactured 07 July 2001.

It has been working fine, but one day it decided not to boot up anymore. Ironically, this occurred while I was in the process of backing up files from that drive.

Whenever I attempt to boot up the hard disk drive, an alert message appears stating:

You have inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OS X can read. To use the unreadable volumes, click Initialize. To continue with the disk inserted, click Ignore.

Apple’s Disk Utility application recognizes it and gives me the option to intialize it, but it does not recognize any volume. I cannot use any of the functions in First Aid.

Disk Warrior also sees it but will not let me do anything with it. I get a message which states:

Directory cannot be rebuilt because... trying to access this disk (::3, ::4).

SpeedTools sees it but will not allow me to mount it.

In TechTool Pro 4, it passes the Disc Controller and Read Write tests with no problems. It is not recognized to perform a SMART test. I can initiate a Surface Scan in TechTool Pro 4 but then it “hangs”, along with the hard disk drive. I must perform a Force Quit in order to leave the application, and I also must turn off the power of the hard disk drive and turn it on again. It is obviously not recognized under any other areas in TechTool Pro 4.

Neither Data Rescue X nor File Salvage recognizes the hard disk drive at all.

In the Disk Utility software, although it does not see any volumes on the hard disk drive, I can partition the drive by simply locking it using the Locked for editing button.

Then, if I want only one partition and I click on the partition button, an alert warns me:

Warning!

Saving the new volumes will erase all existing volumes. This can NOT be undone. Are you sure you want to do that?

If I choose to click on the Partition button after receiving this warning, will it erase all of the data on my hard disk drive as well as the now-Untitled volume, or will it allow me to simply erase the existing volume and create a new volume while keeping the data?

Perhaps I am wrong, but I suspect there is a bad block preventing the volume directory from being read. The hard disk drive seems to operate fine physically, and I suspect that if I initialize it, the hard disk drive will work fine — but then I lose all of the files that were on it.

My Dual 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 computer is operating under Mac OS X version 10.2.8 with 1 gigabyte of RAM, although the disk is not recognized by my 400 MHz PowerPC blue-and-white G3 operating Mac OS 9.2.2.

I went to an Apple Store, and the person at the Genius Bar told me they do not provide that type of service.

If I can just extract the remaining files from that hard disk drive, I can then re-intialize it. I will then be happy.

Thank you in advance for any tips, ideas and suggestions.

[max916]

im having the same problem with my maxtor one touch 150g and I run os 10.4.6 I don't know if their is a update and Iv lost tons of info to this problem with that brand of external hard drives.. Im switching to seagate!

[eothdl]

Hi,

I am having an identical problem with a seagate drive. I actually had this problem about a year ago. But I bought a new enclosure and everything had been working fine until today. In my experience, there isn't a way to retrieve your files beyond sending the drive to a recovery service. Also, this is a problem that Apple knows about, but doesn't seem to have fixed. Here is a link to an article from 2003 that talks about this problem, http://www.macworld.com/news/2003/11...src=mcrss-1103.

I wish I knew what was causing the failure. Is it just using firewire or is it some incompatibility between externals and OSX? I'm going to try just using USB from now on, which is annoying. What's the point of having a back up drive if it fails?