External Firewire Troubles, External Firewire Drive Won't Unmount/Er Options

[banevt]

Hello all
I have an ibook G3 running OSX 10.3.9. My issue is with an external firewire 400 drive I have. The other day I tried to trash something on the drive and it wouldn't go to the trash. I tried restarting but still it wouldn't let me trash anything. I tried to run Disk Utility and repair the disk but it said it couldn't do it because the drive wouldn't unmount and is still in use. I checked to see if any applications were running but nothing else was running. I have to force eject it from the Terminal just to unmount it from my desktop. I backed up all my data and as I was backing it up I found that a lot of the recent files I'd been working with wouldn't copy becuase they could not be read or written. So I tried to erase the drive but I get the same error message about not being able to unmount the drive. I have tried Disk Warrior and it gives me the same message. I've tried logging out and back in. Booting from a startup CD, and booting up in safe mode. I can't figure out what the problem could be. The fact that I can't even erase the firewire drive from the CD boot makes me fear the drive may be dead. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Valente

[banevt]

Thanks for the tip lepetitmartien I looked up the makers of the enclosure and had to hunt down the drivers I needed. I had heard about the oxford chipset being a problem in panther but my chipset isn't oxford but they had an update for 10.3 and also a disk utility software for OS 9. I installed the driver and no change in OSX. I have a dual boot iBook so I tried the OS 9 software and I thought it was fixed, but the same problem keeps popping up. Initialize or Erase fail because disk is in use. I've tried reformatting from the Terminal I've tried to erase folders from the drive in the Terminal but every time I get this message


rm: /Volumes/Bubo 1/ZuZu Samples/.DS_Store: Invalid argument
rm: /Volumes/Bubo 1/ZuZu Samples/JJP ROOMY KIK: Invalid argument
rm: /Volumes/Bubo 1/ZuZu Samples/JJP- NS10 KIK: Invalid argument
rm: /Volumes/Bubo 1/ZuZu Samples/JJP- REVERB SNARE: Invalid argument
rm: /Volumes/Bubo 1/ZuZu Samples/JJP- SMALL SNARE: Invalid argument
rm: /Volumes/Bubo 1/ZuZu Samples: Invalid argument


I just ran fsck command on my drive and got this message it doesn't seem very good.


** /Volumes/Bubo 1 (NO WRITE)

CANNOT READ: BLK 16
CONTINUE? [yn] y

THE FOLLOWING DISK SECTORS COULD NOT BE READ: 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31,
ioctl (GCINFO): Inappropriate ioctl for device
fsck: /Volumes/Bubo 1: can't read disk label



I wonder if I should try another computer like you said before or maybe even a new enclosure or would that not make a difference? All my important data is backed up so I'm just looking for a fullproof, bulletproof way to eradicate this drive and reformat it. Once again any help is greatly appreciated, and thanks again lepetitmartien for the tips. I was sure you had it solved.

Valente

This post has been edited by banevt: Thu 23 Jun 2005, 07:01