can't mount a wd hard drive on a mac

[EricDavid]

hello all. i am new to forums. this is actually the first time i have posted in on, but i have a problem. i have a mac book with os x 10.4.11, and a western digital 250Gig external hard drive model number wd2500xmsa-00. i use the external hard drive to store movies and pictures. yesterday i ejected it by dragging it to the trash while i was emptying the trash. yeah, kind of stupid. now i can't mount the hard drive. i tried the disk utility but non of the options work and i haven't tried the erase option. i tried diskwarrior 4.1 but that seems to be only for mac hard disks. i am totally unexperienced at repairing broken hard disks. any advice or programs i should consider? I would be eternally grateful and my wife would be so happy i didn't lose all the pictures!!

eric

[asusfreak44]

Well the biggest question here would be what filesystem is it using?
NTFS? Fat32? Linux variety?

[EricDavid]

when i look at the computer's internal hard drive it says the file system is Mac OS Extended (journaled) however when i look at the information for the external using disc utility it does not give a file system. it says the partition type is Windows_FAT_32. Does that mean that it is a FAT32 file system?

[Fizur2002]

thats the conclusion i would come to. See about getting yourself a copy of acronis true image and see if it can find your drive. You could also try hooking it up to a windows PC and see if it will find it on there and save your data and do a wipe of it in your mac so its setup with a MAC file system.

[JohnMayer]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fizur2002

thats the conclusion i would come to. See about getting yourself a copy of acronis true image and see if it can find your drive. You could also try hooking it up to a windows PC and see if it will find it on there and save your data and do a wipe of it in your mac so its setup with a MAC file system.

Well, I DID wipe the data from my external FAT32 HD, or at least tried to; using Disk Utility I selected HFS extended and journaled and hit the “Erase” button. Almost immediately I got a message telling me “Volume erase failed with the error: The underlying task reported failure on exit.” I can see the greyed disk’s numerical name and info shows it to be properly reformatted. But it won’t mount.

What now/

Thanks.

Yours truly,
John Mayer