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 suggestions dixiechicken. Yes my data is all backed up except for a few corrupt apple loop files I can always reinstall. It is a 60 GB Hitachi Travelstar 2.5" 7200RPM drive so to install it in a laptop could be a tricky process. I'm not even sure what kind of enclosure it is. I just typed the model number in a search engine and found a lot of websites I had to translate. The model number is "Y-255C". I was also thinking of trying to connect the drive to a PC but I don't have access to one. I have Virtual PC but I don't know if that would work the same way. And yes the enclosure doesn't have the Oxford 911 chipset. I usually never mess with enclosures that don't use the oxford, but I'd never had any experiences with other chipsets and I began to wonder if stability of the oxford chipset over all others was just dogma. I have had one drive that failed with the oxford cihpset but that was only because the actual disk would get stuck and stop spinning so I guess it was more of a mechanical failure. I'm sure there are other quality chipsets out there I don't know about, but if it is indeed the eclosure and not the drive I probably won't ever stray from oxford like I never stray from the popcorn button on the microwave.

This post has been edited by banevt: Fri 24 Jun 2005, 20:35