Iomega external HD no longer mounting, disk utility fails to resolve issue.

I have an Iomega external HD (1TB) that's been working faithfully for two years as my time machine backup. I have Mac OS X 10.6.8. This morning, the HD was no longer showing up on my desktop. I have tried to mount the HD through disk utility and it states it is unable to mount the drive. A screenshot of what I see on disk utility is below. The drive still lights up, sounds like it is running and the drive is active. I have also done the following:
1. verfied drive; states it needs repairs. When repairs attempted, utility goes on, and on, and on with no progress and I have to force quit.
2. Have reset the PRAM and nothing changes.
3. Have started mac in safe mode, still not recognized and same error messages given in disk utility.
4. Other external HD works fine on mac, have not had any software changes/updates since yesterday that I know of that would affect anything.
5. USB and Firewire ports all functioning correctly and the drive is recognized on those under system profiler.
5. I have attached the problem HD to my Windows XP laptop (an old one but still works) and the drive is recognized under device manager but does not show on the desktop (formatted for mac though, so not too surprising).
Would appreciate anyone's advice on this one, have hit a wall.

Turn off Time Machine, select the 1TB ST310005 Media Drive instead of the Time Machine partition and see if it will Repair.
If that doesn't work, you might Erase / Repair / Format and start over providing that there is nothing critical on the Time Machine backup that you can't live without.

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You can try to use other disk repair tools like TechTool, DiskWarrior or Drive 10. They usually give better results and could save your data without formatting the drive, if it is not physically damaged.
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From the menu bar, select
 ▹ System Preferences ▹ Energy Saver ▹ Power Adapter
and uncheck the box labeled Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible, if it's checked.
If the drive has more than one interface (USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, eSATA), try one of the other interfaces.
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Test the drive with another Mac. Test another drive with this Mac.
If the drive is bus-powered, but has an AC adapter, connect the adapter.
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My External HDD doesnt shown in disk utility or in finder

My External HDD doesnt shown in disk utility or in finder
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Do you have your Finder Preferences set to show external drives?
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I have 4 Trojan Horse viruses on my external drive I use for Time Machine. My MacBook Pro hard drive is clean. I have eased the external drive 3 times using Disk Utility and it still has the 4 Trojan Horse viruses. How do I get rid of them. I am using 10.8.3 Wayne

ksu62 wrote:
The infection names are: classload.jar-719ef6a5.zip
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Those look alot like file names and not infection names. I don't find any reference to anything like that on Norton or VirusTotal. Since you said these were Trojans, I would expect to see "Trojan" as part of the infection name.
".jar" files are executable Java applets. The random alpha-numerics would seem to indicate a cache file, likely from a browser with Java enabled. And we all know what ".zip" means.
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rpignard wrote:
Any advice or ways to fix that once and for all ?
Since your Recovery HD and Windows partition work fine, the problem is located in your Macintosh HD partition and I very highly suspect it's bad/failing sectors that's to blame for your troubles.
This can sometimes occur if the computer was moved while the hard drive was in operation, else sectors fail all by themselves, or if the drive is having mechanical issues, which you problem will continue no matter what you do.
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Once that is completed, reinstall OS X from Recovery, any programs from original sources, files only from backup and your problems hopefully should disappear.
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Welcome To  Discussions jeff_st!
If all else fails, and you have access to another Firewire enabled Mac, you can also use Firewire Target Disk Mode, to backup as much data as possible.
Then reformat the HD, zeroing all data, and perform an Erase & Install.
ali b

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Hi Dominic,
If this is still not mounting, it may be worth trying a PRAM reset...
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
Ben

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* BUMP *
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I have a 1TB external Seagate drive which is used to store my time machine backup for an iMac (2010). My time machine is failing as it says there is no backup disk. I ran disk utility. I see it on the external drive on the list below the line on the drive listings. I see the external drive and the time machine volume indented below it. I verified the external disk and it says it is fine. However it will not let me mount the external drive or the time machine partition. I cannot even re-format the disk because it says it cannot be unmounted (which is obvious it it does not let me mount it). It is connecting to the drive because it can see the verify results. I also tried every combination of unplugging power and cables to both the unit and the Mac itself.
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Thank you for the information, baltwo. The problem now is that none of my drives mount, so I can't do anything with them. They don't show up on the Desktop, in Disk Utility or in System Preferences > Startup Disk. When I turn on the drive I use with SuperDuper, SD says it can't be found. In System Profiler > Firewire, I get a Warning, in red, Unable to list Firewire devices.
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Message was edited by: Pram

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Message was edited by: rpeters83

Odd...
Using MacDrive, i'm able to view my files on the HFS drive from windows, go figure. So i'm backing them up right now and am going to reformat the external.
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Iomega external HD no longer mounting, disk utility fails to resolve issue.

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