How do I restore and carry out maintenance on external drives

Under OS9 I used to regularly carry out optimising and maintenance on my mac and external hard drives. Now that I'm on OSX, I can't use Norton Utilities - that doesn't seem to work at all. Techtool Pro doesn't seem to fix external hard drives connected by firewire. Neither does Diskwarrior. How do I do maintenance for my mac and my drives. I have an external LaCie 160GB porsche firewire drive - that seems to have stopped working but I can't carry out any serious diagnostics as I have nothing that seems to work - DiskUtility doesn't carry out a full test and comes back with errors. I also have a Formac Oxygen 160GB external drive connected by Firwire which has also recently stopped working (when I mean stopped working, I mean that the mac no longer sees all the files I have stored on the drive and asks me if I want to initialise the drive - to which I obviously say no). I need to access the files on these external drives but can't get the mac to do this. Any help?

Hi Naz,
Norton Utilities does not work with OS X -- in fact it often makes problems worse. I fear NU has corrupted your external drives' directory structures.
* Remove Norton: How to manually uninstall Norton SystemWorks for Macintosh 2.x.
* Boot from your install CD/DVD and run Disk Utility. Repair Disk for the external drives. If DU can't repair, you can attempt DiskWarrior (it DOES work on external drives).
Good luck; let us know how it goes.
John

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The best regards
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