IBook and external HDD - Advice needed

Question

Hi all,
I am using an old G3 white dual USB iBook with OS X 10.2.8. The backlight cable broke a year ago, and I finally worked up the nerve to replace it myself...and while I'm in there, I'd like to drop in a new 120GB Seagate hard drive to replace the practically full 30GB in there now. Now before I do all this, I really want to back everything up to an external hard disk.
I have an old Western Digital Caviar 60GB disk that I put into an external enclosure (an AcomData 509), but so far I've had no luck getting Disk Utility to reformat it. Disk Utility sees the hardware and reports it as "0,00 Bytes DMI" and gives the correct model number for the disk, however DU simply won't reformat.
When I tried to put an Apple Extended partition on there, it popped up a progress window saying "Setting up partition map" with a blue candy cane progress bar and then just sits there doing nothing. CPU usage doesn't go up, the drive light never flickers, and right clicking DU in the Dock never reports that the app isn't responding. If I try to quit, it just beeps and won't quit. The console has the following lines:
May 19 13:00:18 c<edited IP address out> kextd[507]: a link/load error occured for kernel extension (null)
/System/Library/Filesystems/msdos.fs/msdos.util: device safe_read error @ 0, Device not configured
The same thing happens even if the option to zero the disk is selected. In either case, DU must be force quit.
So, with no success there, I decided to try to format it as an MS-DOS File System. Clicking Erase makes a progress window with the candy cane bar very quickly pop up and then disappear with no indication that anything happened at all. The console had the following lines after that:
/System/Library/Filesystems/msdos.fs/msdos.util: device safe_read error @ 0, Device not configured
/sbin/newfs_msdos: warning: /dev/disk2 is not a character device
/sbin/newfs_msdos: meta data exceeds file system size
If I select the zero disk option, the progress window pops up flashing "Remounting Volume" then "Writing zeros" and then DU abruptly crashes. If anyone needs the crashdump log, I'll be happy to post it, but it is very long.
Typing "diskutil list" in the terminal shows:
/dev/disk2
#: type name size identifier
0: *0.0 B disk2
1: 0.0 B disk2
Typing "diskutil info /dev/disk2" reports
Device Node: /dev/disk2
Device Identifier: disk2
Mount Point:
Volume Name:
can't open: /dev/disk2 (Permission denied)
File System:
Partition Type:
Media Type: Generic
Protocol: USB
Total Size: 0.0 B
Free Space: 0.0 B
Read Only: No
Ejectable: No
I thought it might be interesting to try the eraseDisk for diskutil, but here's what happened:
sudo diskutil eraseDisk HFS+ BackupDisk /dev/disk2
Password:
error -5344 making new partition
Unmount old disk
Erasing disk2
/sbin/newfs_hfs: write (sector 0, 45568 bytes): Device not configured
Remounting volume
Could not mount disk
I'm not very familiar with using fdisk, but when I tried to run it with "sudo fdisk" it told me it must be run as root...ok?
This drive originally had Redhat Linux 7 with one large ext2 partition if I remember right. Clearly something happened to it, but I don't know what.
Since I really need this data backed up, I tried using my 3rd gen 20GB iPod, but unfortunately, when I try to copy over my home directory I routinely get an error -50. This happens on specific files, but even when I try to copy one at a time, I still get a message that certain files or folders couldn't be copied. The iPod is formatted FAT32, if that makes any difference.
So, I need some advice. Should I go buy a new had drive to put in the enclosure and hope this one works? Would it be better to find a NAS, and if so, what's a good model? Should I get a 2.5" external enclosure and put the old iBook hard drive in there and try to mount that once I've installed Tiger on the new Seagate? (I know there are bound to be permission issues with getting into my home directory like that...)
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance.
iBook dual USB, 600MHz G3, 30GB HD   Mac OS X (10.2.x)  

Answer 1

Thank you for the suggestions.
I tried the repartitioning, but DU stalled out with the message "Preparing drives ... unmounting old volumes." It still didn't report any higher cpu usage, the drive light never flashed, and DU wouldn't quit normally. I tried using diskutil partitionDisk at the command line, and that returned an "error -5344 making new partition" and "You have specified partition sizes which will not fit on the device." I tried 60G as the size, and when that didn't work, I tried all the way down to 30G, still with the same result. (Interestingly, DU no longer says the disk is a WD600 as before - it just says "DMI" under the description.) What could I be doing wrong?
Oh, with the iPod I was trying to copy only a few folders, like a "School" folder, from my home directory, not the whole thing at once. It copied fine for a while, then it returned the error -50 and stopped. The message dialog with the error -50 stayed up there and would never go away, and if I tried to log out or restart, I'd be told the Finder couldn't quit because some operation was still in progress.
If I tried to copy a different folder, or copy smaller batches of files, I'd either still get that error, or the Finder would say that it couldn't copy a file, and ask if I wanted to stop or continue. Whichever choice I made, the message dialog wouldn't go away, even if the rest of the copy completed successfully. Trying to log out or restart would again tell me the Finder couldn't quit as before.
I should mention that the exact same thing happens when I try to copy some things out to my USB drive (a SanDisk Cruzer Micro). A few years ago, when I tried to copy some school files from the iBook onto a Windows 2000 (NTFS) machine over a network, I had a similar problem with the error -50. I got around that by going to the Win machine and using it to do the copy. Copying onto the iBook from either machine worked just fine, though.
Anywho, those other drive enclosures are very nice, but they're so expensive, and if I had to get a new drive, too, I might have to not eat for the rest of the month, lol. And I doubt I could get one shipped and get this little machine all fixed up before school starts next week (and I'll definitely be needing it for school, unfortunately).
So barring a good enclosure, do you think I'd have better luck with a MyBook external or something similar? Or a NAS? What worries me is that if I'm already having trouble copying onto the iPod and the USB drive, what are the chances it'll be any better with one of those? Could it just be some issue with FAT32?
Would it be possible for me to get a 2.5" enclosure and put the iBook's current disk in there, do my repairs, install Tiger on the new Seagate, and then mount the old disk over Firewire and move my files to the new disk that way? How would I make my files public so the new install will let me read them? In Windows, making the folder shared was enough...any suggestions for something equivalent in OS X (Jaguar)?
Again, thanks for your help, very much appreciated. ~:o)
iBook dual USB, 600MHz G3, 30GB HD Mac OS X (10.2.x)
iBook dual USB, 600MHz G3, 30GB HD Mac OS X (10.2.x)