DiskWarrior

run disk first aid on the bootup drive. and if that doesn't work, then run diskwarrior on both of them. i have found that the problem with recognition is more often on the boot drive than the unrecognized drive. ...

that's exactly the behavior i had the first time i encountered this problem. i spent 3 days trying every disk repair app i had. no luck. untill diskwarrior was suggested and i tried it. i figured even if it didn't work, you can never have too many repair apps. but it did and within a half hour it was back up. ...

it runs from os 9 only at this point. it should recognise and repair your FW drive by first launching diskwarrior and then plugging the drive in and rebuilding the directories. it has brought my 80 gb FW HD back from non recognition twice now. ...

It had a kernel panic yesterday. So, I pulled out my trusty Diskwarrior application, ran it through its paces, but hey! It didn't work. I ran Norton, no positive results. ...

to repair an external drive with a real utility like diskwarrior once you're back up. if that's the case, simply unplug the external drive during your brief darkscreen time. ...

did this just start happening? did anything happen before hand like a crash or power outage? will classic boot in os x? you might try a disk repair app like diskwarrior, techtool pro or drive10. also, can you boot up in single user mode (apple & S) and run fsck?

that works when you need it. If you try to recover a disk that won't mount with Norton, you get garbage. Use DiskWarrior and you'll be back up and running in 5 minutes. ...

outside of the limitations of the amount of memory a machine has, is there a limit to how much increasing the amount of memory dedicated to a particular app will actually help? or is it like cache size, at a certain point it has more info than it can check in a reasonable time and thus works against the speed of working with the app? i'm primarily concerned here with my...

or DiskWarrior to do it? ...

well, when it relates to the directory, i'd move on to disk repair utilities. first disk utility or fsck, then DiskWarrior if that didn't work. ...