My powerbook just panic kerneled while I was using pro tools. My external drive was on when this happened. I turned both items off. Reset the computer, and when it had booted the operating system I turned on the external drive. The drive is partitioned into 3 parts(recordings, samples, production). When turned on it would only load up 2 of the 3 partitions. The recording partition appears to have disappeared. I have reset the drive numerous times to no avail. I am not a computer tech type guy, and have no idea what to do. Half my album is stored on this portion of my drive, and I must figure out a way to recover this data....ANY help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

did you try disc utility yet to see if that can see your missing partition? it's happened to me before that my mac just decided to unmount the icon for good until i chose to mount it again.

If disc utility (Mac HDD-> Applications -> Utilities -> Disc Utility) does not fix it (use the repair disc option on the first aid tab), then try Disk Warrior to recover the directory. I have used this app successfully on 10 drives (mine and others) and it has proven to be more than worth the price for the heartaches averted.

Best of luck!

peace

After you get the partition back (I 'm thinking positively for you) you may want to back everything up and redo the drive. In the OS 9 world there were some benefits to multiple partitions on a drive, but with OS X there really is no benefit. Good luck.

As deaconblue proposed try first the disc utility, then the same thru the install CD/DVD of OS X (on tiger install it's hidden in the utilities menu once in the installer). The diskwarrior, techtools, datarescue. But if Disk warrior doesn't do the trick you can start to be pessimistic. Techtools may repair other stuff eventually.