HELP! MY EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE CAN'T BE ACCESSED!!

I accicentally changed the permissons on my New Lacie external Hard Drive and now the hard drive cannot be seen on my desk top and I don't have access to it. It can be seen in disk utility, but I cannot access it at all. Please, anyone, help me!

@simon backhouse
Your problem is a little different. I am guessing that your external drive was formatted using HFS+ (the standard Mac file system). Windows can not recognize this, although it detects that something is attached to your computer.
I would also guess that when you are in XP, you can not see your Mac OS X partition (the one on your internal drive).
To solve this issue, the only remedy I know is something called MacDrive. Once you install MacDrive in XP, you should be able to see all your HFS+ (i.e. Mac OS X) partitions and external drives. Furthermore, you will be able to save files to them.
Here is the link for the trial version of MacDrive: http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/freetrial.asp

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Ok, deep breath & relax...
What format & partition table is the drive in?
On the macbook with drive installed, Open up Mac HD/Applications/Disk Utility.app
Select the drive from the list. If the partition scheme is GUID, then 10.3 won't be able to see it.
& changing requires a reformat of the drive.
So, what I would do is hold T while booting the macbook until the firewire logo shows on the screen. plug the 2 macs together via firewire 400 cable. your macbook should now show up as a firewire drive on the ibook.
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Hi,
I've been up all night on my iBook G4 trying to reformat my new, 60g SimpleTech external hard drive. Here is my situation:
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Hi,
I just bought a 120GB SimpleTech drive yesterday and I am having the same problem:
"in Disk Utility, when I highlight its icon and click on the "Erase" tab to reformat it, the "Volume Format" menu is grey, it won't let me click on it"
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thanks

HELP! MY EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE CAN'T BE ACCESSED!!

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