External hard drive problem.

[OnyxCollie]

I had been using a 500 gb LaCie USB hard drive for my Time Machine backup. I noticed that Time Machine would report backup failures. Sometimes the hard drive would unmount itself. Then it wouldn't appear, even with Disk Utility. After some effort, I got it to mount. I tried to erase and reformat it, and Disk Utility said "input/output failure." It won't show up at all now.

Is my hard drive fried?

[struggle4progress]

1. Did it make horrid noises? Did you move it while the disk was spinning?

How is it connected -- USB? firewire? Have you tried changing the port you connect it to?

Have you tried rebooting OS X?

Have you try shutting EVERYTHING down and then unplugging computer and drive power supplies for a few minutes before reconnecting and restarting?

[OnyxCollie]

3. It's a USB hard drive.

(I was disappointed to discover I couldn't use it as a start up drive.)

It wasn't making any noises, and while I didn't move it while it was spinning, the computer is dog-accessible.

What do you mean by rebooting OS X? Relaunching the finder?

I've shut everything down. Didn't unplug though.

I have disconnected the hard drive and hooked it up to my laptop (It's normally hooked up to my G5.) That was how I managed to get it back up the first time. I haven't been able to reproduce that, however.

[struggle4progress]

4. On some discussion board (? a week or so back) that I was looking at because my computer

had just stopped recognizing a firewire drive after ejection and attempt to remount, an apple representative asserted that some memory is persistent as long as the computer and drive can draw any current -- so, the suggestion went, if shutdown and reboot didn't work, one should try shutdown, unplug everything, wait a few minutes, reconnect, reboot

Could be a wiffly port or cable. I have a G5 at work with some USB ports dying off

Why can't you use it as a start-up drive? It needs to be formatted correctly, of course, but my macs will boot off properly formatted usb drives or flashdrives, if the right software is installed

[struggle4progress]

2. BTW I think TM unmounts and remounts the drive. One cause of TM errors can be

spotlight indexing the TM drive when the TM drive attempts to unmount. Turning off spotlight for the TM drive fixes that problem

If you're running an anti-virus, you may also want to set it up so it doesn't scan the TM drive on remount