Lightroom 3 corrupting images on external drive.

I'm using Lightroom 3 with the catalog on my macbook and original files on seagate firewire goflex external hardrive, 
( has happened with 2 different firewire seagate hardrives) Lightroom has been corrupting some images (edits and some originals) randomly, which are then un-retrievable apart from my personal back ups.

It's quite understandable that you might suspect Lightroom in those circumstances. However, there are very many threads in this and other forums which start off with the words "Lightroom is corrupting my images", yet in virtaully every case this turns out not to be the case and the culprit is usually a hardware problem somewhere in the pipeline from camera through to computer.....and the challenge is trying to nail it. Remember that Lightroom doesn't usually write to your image files.
I suggest we start by filling in some of the blanks, such as trype of file we are dealing with, e.g. Raw, DNG, Jpeg? What form does this corruption take, can you post a screenshot showing it? Have you tried opening one of the "corrupted" files in PS or PSE (if you have it installed), if so with what result? And can you upload one of the originals which appear corrupted in Lightroom to a file-sharing site such as Dropbox or yousendit so that we can download and try to load into Lightroom to check?

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