External Hard Drive Woes?

[Spiral Girl]

Hi,

I got a G-Tech 500 GB Quadra drive a week ago since my internal drive got rewritten over with Windows XP so want to try and do file recovery. No, I'm not hopeful but want to try for as long as I can.

Anywho with my 500GB I divided it into 3 partitions and put Tiger on each partition. The main partition I'm booting off of everytime I start my Mac is called iMac Extra (also have iMac Primary and iMac Secondary partitions). The problem started a few days ago where disk utility crashes and disk images won't open.

Also sometimes I can't put the other two partitions in the trash when I close down. (According to G-Tech this is normal as I'm booting off from the drive itself so they aren't supposed to eject) so ignore this part

Upon restart the problem usually is okay and I've done a repair disk permissions a few times which fix the problem temporarily. I had Stuffit 11 on there and dumped that thinking that might be the problem. I don't know if this problem occurs with other partitions as I haven't tried Disk Utility or opening disk images.

Any ideas why this is happening?

S.