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

[dixiechicken]

Your data is backed up - right?

Try to connect the drive to a PC (yes) and see IF you are allowed to format the drive
as a NTFS filesystem/partition. (sometimes this works)

If success - then you can try to connect fw-drive to your mac and re-format it
to a hfs+.


You can also take the external case apart -
put the harddrive itself into another Mac or PC -
to check that the drive mecchanism itself is OK.

Try to install Mac OS or Windows XP on the suspect drive and see.
If this works then tour trouble lies with the controller on the external fw-drive-case.
( this is a lengty procedure I know - but...)

Cheers: Dixiechicken