Leopard - External drive disappeared!

Hi, I'm really puzzled here. After 5 days of normal use, the external drive where I do my back ups with Time Machine simply disappeared! It's non to be found!
I rebooted, restarted, disconnected, reconnected...nothing! Now when I connect the drive (a new Iomega 500GB) to my imac or my wife's macbook, the computers can't see it!
Any idea on how to manage this weird situation? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks

Me too! I have a 500GB WD My Book 'Studio Edition'. It is formatted using HFS+ (Journaled). Upon initial hook-up, it showed on my desktop and prompted user action for enabling Time Machine. A few days after, the 'My Book' icon that shows on the desktop after mount does not exist. I've looked at 'Finder Preferences' and all are check marked. at I tried Disk Utility, and it shows 'My Book' as mounted properly. I tried verifying then repairing the HD, and Disk Utility shows my HD as functioning properly. I even went into Script Editor and keyed in some prompts to enable my desktop icons to 'true'. I then disconnected my firewire 800 cable from my iMac as well as the other perepheral's. I then unplugged the HD and the iMac. I let sit overnight to reboot the firewire ports. I then plugged everything back in and the icon still, refused to show in the desktop. I called Apple to report the issue as I feel it's a bug within Time Machine. At the time of my call, they wanted me to speak with their 'Chronic Specialists' (or something of the sort) but they were closed for the night. I plan on calling asap in the AM to report the issue. Time Machine has a minor flaw I'm afraid.
In the meantime, create an alias for your external HD as it will be an easy way to access your drive until the issue is resolved.
-Nic
PS- Some might still be able to access files from the missing external hd. If you can recall a folder title within the hd, finder will retrieve it.
Message was edited by: Anjunafreak

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External Drive Disappeared!

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Armando,
If you have data you wish to retrieve from the old external drive, I would suggest getting a copy of DiskWarrior and using it to re-build the file system on the drive. This often fixes a drive that is not mounting or failing to transfer files due to directory corruption. Of course, if the drive has a hardware failure there is not much you can do to get to your data.
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http://www.hardmac.com/articles/16/
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922 is only used in dual drive cases to provide a "build-in firmware RAID support"
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I have a 298.1 GB external Western Digital hard drive connected to my iMac by a USB 2.0 cable. It is formatted in NTFS-3G so I can use it with both my PC and Mac. Yesterday in Disk Utility I created a 50GB 256-bit encrypted DMG and told Disk Utility to save it on a folder in my external drive. It got to about 20GB and then my house's power went out. A few hours later when the power came back on, I turned on my computer, and the available space on my external hard drive went down from about 100GB to 68.21GB.
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2009-06-14 11:12:33 -0400: Verifying volume “SHADUSMEDIA”
Starting verification tool: 2009-06-14 11:12:33 -0400
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for LOG_LEVEL: 2
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for UBLIO_ENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for PROBE_DISABLED: 0
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for MOUNTRDISKSENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for NFCONV_ENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Read defaults value for ALWAYS_RECOVER: 1
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: ntfs-3g script invoked with command line "/System/Library/Filesystems/ntfs-3g.fs/ntfs-3g.util" "-v" "/dev/disk1s1"
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: Invoking user: MP
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: [Verify] Entering function Verify.
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: ** No NTFS file system checks have been implemented yet.
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: ** Reporting that the volume is fine without checking anything.
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: [Verify] Reporting that the volume is fine, even though that may not be the case (no fs checks performed).
2009-06-14 11:12:35 -0400: [Verify] Returning from function Verify.
Verifying tool completed: 2009-06-14 11:12:42 -0400
So it appears that it's only telling me that it's fine without even checking. I then tried repair disk and got the error message:
2009-06-14 11:14:25 -0400: Verify and Repair volume “SHADUSMEDIA”
Starting repair tool: 2009-06-14 11:14:25 -0400
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for LOG_LEVEL: 2
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for UBLIO_ENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for PROBE_DISABLED: 0
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for MOUNTRDISKSENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for NFCONV_ENABLED: 1
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Read defaults value for ALWAYS_RECOVER: 1
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: ntfs-3g script invoked with command line "/System/Library/Filesystems/ntfs-3g.fs/ntfs-3g.util" "-y" "/dev/disk1s1"
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Invoking user: MP
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: [Repair] Entering function Repair...
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: [Repair] Marking volume to be checked at next Windows boot.
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: [Repair] "/usr/local/bin/ntfsfix" "" currently disabled.
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: ** /usr/local/bin/ntfsfix has been disabled because of volume corruption issues.
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: ** If you still want to try fixing your volume, use /usr/local/bin/ntfsfix from the command line...
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: [Repair] Returning from function Repair with FSUR_INVAL.
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400:
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400: Disk Utility stopped repairing “SHADUSMEDIA” because the following error was encountered:
Filesystem verify or repair failed.
2009-06-14 11:14:26 -0400:
I tried restarting my iMac and disconnected and reconnecting the cable and that didn't work. I plugged it into my PC and it still says that all the files on my external drive add up to 194.12 GB. Which still means I should have 103.98 GB of free space instead of 68.21 GB.
So I'm stumped now and not quite sure what to do. Here is the information about the external drive from Disk Utility:
Name : SHADUSMEDIA
Type : Volume
Disk Identifier : disk1s1
Mount Point : /Volumes/SHADUSMEDIA
File System : Windows NT Filesystem (NTFS-3G)
Connection Bus : USB
Device Tree : IODeviceTree:/PCI0@0/USB7@1D,7
Writable : Yes
Capacity : 298.1 GB (320,070,288,384 Bytes)
Free Space : 68.3 GB (73,348,239,360 Bytes)
Used : 229.8 GB (246,722,048,512 Bytes)
Number of Files : 145,472
Number of Folders : 0
Owners Enabled : Yes
Can Turn Owners Off : No
Can Repair Permissions : No
Can Be Verified : Yes
Can Be Repaired : Yes
Can Be Formatted : Yes
Bootable : No
Supports Journaling : No
Journaled : No
Disk Number : 1
Partition Number : 1
You can see on there it says I've used 229.8 GB, when I've actually only used 194.12 GB. Here are the specs from System Profiler for my iMac:
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM51.0090.B09
SMC Version: 1.8f2
Serial Number: QP6450GKVUX
I'm running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6. If you need any more information just ask, I'd really like to get my 30GB back. Thanks in advance.

Can anyone help?

External Hard Drive disappearing from desktop

I recently bought two external USB drives to use with Time Machine, one for my PowerBook G4, and one for my iMac.
The one that I connected to my PowerBook at home works without a problem, but the other one, not so much.
I use my iMac in the classroom, and I set everything up to work with Time Machine. No problems. The drive was recognized, I reformatted it, and the initial backup finished without a problem. Then, later, I noticed that the hard drive was no longer showing up on my desktop, and checking Time Machine showed that things hadn't been backing up hourly as they should have been.
I launched Disk Utility, but the hard drive didn't show up, so I couldn't mount it that way. Plugging and unplugging the USB cable didn't help, so I shut down the computer and turned off the hard drive. I turned the drive back on and then restarted the computer. It was back, and Time Machine immediately started running again.
But then later the drive disappeared again! I went through the same process as before, but this time I switched the USB ports before I restarted. It was back.
But then later, it was gone again.
The other strange thing is that even when I restart the computer, the drive doesn't reappear unless I've turned the drive off.
Any suggestions? Is there some auto-unmount and never come back again option in Leopard that I'm not aware of?

Does the drive even show up in Disk Utility? If so, run Disk Utility and verify (and repair if necessary) the drive:
[Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214]
[Using Disk Utility in Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302672]
if it doesn't show up in Disk Utility and you don't have any other copy of the files you will need to try a stronger utility such as [Diskwarrior|http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior> to try to repair the drive. Otherwise you can try to copy off the files using a utility such as [Data Rescue II|http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php] or [FileSalvage|http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?mainpage=product_info&productsid=1]. Both have free trial versions that let you see if the software will help before you decide to buy.

Leopard - External drive disappeared!

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