My WD 500 GB Ext. Hard drive suddenly won't mount

Hey guys,
I use a WD mybook 500 GB HD through Firewire 800 on My iMac. It is used solely as my Scratch disk for FCP. Suddenly today when i turn on the computer it dosent mount on the desktop along with the MacHD. I ve tried all the repairing permissions, Disk utility. Ive gotten so frustrated i went out and bought another HD, an Iomega. Its not showing up either. I now think its something in the Computer. I have been using the MyBook for about a year now with no problems. Side note...i tried downloading the 10.5.6 update. it hung up while "configuring Installation" Things seem to be going wrong after that. I have also already tried booting up with the Leopard disk into first aid. That didn't help either.
Any suggestions
Thanks Everyone,
Steve

the most important lesson here is that EVERY DRIVE WILL FAIL. It's the nature of the universe. Some drives will fail sooner than others, some drives will give signs that they are beginning to fail, while others will suddenly die a quick death. Do not assume that because you buy one of the brand drives that Jerry recommends that the drive will not fail, although they are definitely more dependable. I've had two drives from one of the brands Jerry mentions fail almost immediately after purchase.
You need to have a workflow that allows you to continue working when you have a drive failure. Make sure all material on video tape is captured with device control, with "abort capture on dropped frames" and "make new clip on timecode break" enabled in your preferences. This will allow you to recapture if necessary. Any files that do not originate in this manner need to be backed up (and even that can be problematic).
Also, I highly recommend you purchase diskwarrior. It's a disk repair program that does one thing and one thing only: repairs the directory structure of a drive. It will repair drives that the disk utility will not fix.

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One last question have you tried theMac OS X 10.4.10 Combo Update v1.1 (Intel)
Note: What’s New in this Version
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Thanks A Brody,
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Sounds like these are your choices,
1: Download Disk Warrior, it's really only good at repairing your directory, it's expensive, it won't repair bad sectors.
and/or
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then
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I wouldn't trust it and have a backup.
I would do #2 and #3 above, if DW screws up your drive or it fails while your working on it... get your data off first.
Read my tips and pages
http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish/Personal11.html

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my 12 inch powerbook laptop body was no good, but the hard drive was. I had a powermac g4 tower with a bad harddrive. After researching, I found this site and I mounted the laptop harddrive into the desktop and boom! my old laptop drive booted up on the desktop powermac. here is the link. a 3 yr old can install this it is way too easy, plus it cost 99 Cents. way cheaper than buying an enclosure.
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I just had to reformat the external hard drive that houses my iPhoto library, then restore it from a backup. Now Time Machine is telling me my backup hard drive suddenly does not have the space to complete a backup. I also noticed when I go in to Time Machine, there are only about 5 backups recorded on the ext. hard drive. There were many more before. Any idea what happened and if I have to buy a new back up hard drive?

Hallo Kieth ,
I am not quite ready to restore the full iphoto library , as I have days of work re - imputting titles,descriptions and enhancement . I hope that your suggestion works , as I use my Macbook basically to work with digital photography. Through time , I will need to delete my library to recover more disc space and I would hate to have to spend more time re - imputting titles and descriptions all over again .
Thanks for your interest and advice.
regards - Alan

My WD 500 GB Ext. Hard drive suddenly won't mount

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