External Hard Drive won't erase. What can i do?

Hey everyone,
The external hard drive i used as a Time Machine for my macbook stopped being recognised but it shows up on Disk Utility. I've already tried to erase it to reformat it but I keep getting an error saying that the disk couldn't be unmounted.
Does anyone know what i can do to make it work again?
Thanks!
Extra:
I've already tried repairing it but Disk Utility simply said it can't repair the disk.

Is Time Machine still trying to use it? Try turning off Time Machine and then try to format it.
Another option might be to try to format it while booting into the Recovery partition. That should sever any ties the OS has with the drive.
If those option fail, I would assume the disk is bad.

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Message was edited by: stewiesno1

External Hard Drive Won't Mount- Need to recover files

Hello Everyone,
I am hoping that one of you fine mac experts may be able to assist ~
Problem: External Seagate FreeAgent Desktop USB external hard drive
won't mount on desktop=ie: no access to my important files.. Please Help!
Details:
External seagate freeagent 500 GB Desktop USB HD ( only 2 months old)
(using for document / file backup-not as a startup disc)
on my Mac G3 350 MZ Blue & White Tower /768 ram/ running OSX 10.1.5 & OS9.2~
~
Problem: Started using the external 500 GB HD 2 months ago -with no problems-until this morning. Tried to double click to open it to access files
and got the "beach ball of death" and needed to restart.
My trusty G3 started up fine, however, the external HD was now
not showing up on the desktop as normal. I troubleshooted -by restarting,
trying different a/c plugs/ different USB ports , ran disk utility..called
seagate -not much help . Seagate said to try the HD on another mac-which I did-
a G5 tower- same problem.
~
The External hard drive will show up in disk utility, but is grayed out.
and when click "mount" same two messages keep showing:
message 1: "a disk attempting to mount as unknown has failed verification or has failed to
mount.please use disk utility to check the disk"
~
message 2- when unplugging and repluggin the usb in-and upon
restart:" you have inserted a disk containg no volumes that mac osx
can read to use unreadable volumes,click initialize to continue with the disk inserted ,click continue"
~
( I really need access to these files- and do not want to re-initialize the HD!!)
I ran Disk Utility /first aid "verify & repair , the following info came up:
Repairing disk "main backup 2007 ".
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid key length ( <<<IN RED )
Repair completed. "
~~
Though it said the repair was completed, the "invalid key length" issue
still comes up when re-running disk utility...Hard drive would still not
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~~~~~
If there is a mac genius out there that can help?- it would be greatly
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1st time-they disconnected me after being on hold 10 minutes-2nd call
I was put on hold for 40 minutes ..Finally spoke to someone ( they are not mac users or mac experts!)and he said I would need to send it to Seagate's Data Recovery-... for a fee of course!
~~~
At this point, I am hoping to just get the files and photos off
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what version?
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L

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Message was edited by: larrygal316

I'm having the same issue. Time machine isn't actively running, though just to be sure I turned the service off through the TM utility: no go. Still can't eject. Getting 'resource busy' from umount (sudo umount /dev/disk1s1, that's my external drive name). Umount on the volume says not mounted. Checked activity monitor and couldn't see any time machine processes running, only fsevents, which has to stay running.
I threw the following:
sudo umount -vf /dev/disk1s1
and the drive umounted. -v is verbose, just in case there were any errors thrown I wanted to know, and -f is force umount, which forces the drive to unmount. Check 'man umount' from terminal to see more info on these.
After doing this a couple times (I was doing some testing with some other things to find a faster solution than having to open terminal and umount) it just started umounting correctly. I have no idea why, but it did. So just keep that command in mind, just in case.
Gryyphyn, out.

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