External Firewire Troubles, External Firewire Drive Won't Unmount/Er Options

[banevt]

Hello all
I have an ibook G3 running OSX 10.3.9. My issue is with an external firewire 400 drive I have. The other day I tried to trash something on the drive and it wouldn't go to the trash. I tried restarting but still it wouldn't let me trash anything. I tried to run Disk Utility and repair the disk but it said it couldn't do it because the drive wouldn't unmount and is still in use. I checked to see if any applications were running but nothing else was running. I have to force eject it from the Terminal just to unmount it from my desktop. I backed up all my data and as I was backing it up I found that a lot of the recent files I'd been working with wouldn't copy becuase they could not be read or written. So I tried to erase the drive but I get the same error message about not being able to unmount the drive. I have tried Disk Warrior and it gives me the same message. I've tried logging out and back in. Booting from a startup CD, and booting up in safe mode. I can't figure out what the problem could be. The fact that I can't even erase the firewire drive from the CD boot makes me fear the drive may be dead. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Valente

[lepetitmartien]

Check the site of the enclosure manufacturer, it may need an update of the firmware as it may be not totally 10.3 compatible…

That's the only thing I can think of

I'd be you, i'd try to mount the drive on another computer and back it up (you'll have to for the eventual firmware update to be safe). Format it and go ahead…