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I have a problem with an external hard drive.

Here's the story.... A month ago, I used SuperDuper to clone hubby's Tiger from his iMac to a Western Digital external drive (via a 400 firewire) before installing Leopard. The ext drive had 3 partitions for his Tiger clone, Aperture vault and Leopard clone.

Leopard was installed successfully and I cloned that before installing his favourite applications, and transferring his docs etc.

The problem started when I tried to transfer his Aperture vault. About a quarter of the way through it crashed the iMac - a gray screen rolled down and a box stated that an error had occurred and to restart the machine by holding in the power button. A few more attempts produced the same result only differing in how much it managed to transfer before crashing.

Disk Utility couldn't repair the "Vault" partition so I booted into the Tiger clone to export the photos to a file to transfer to Leopard. Again the iMac crashed during transfer. Just to make sure it wasn't the iMac that was causing the problem I hooked up my MacBook Pro and tried but it crashed that too.

Using Disk Utility again, I found it wouldn't recognize the Leopard or Vault partitions - just the Tiger one.

Not wanting to risk loosing all hubby's photos and data, we bought the "Data Rescue II" application and thank goodness it was able to recover all his work.... huge sigh of relief..!!

Ok, now I thought I might be able to use Disk Utility to erase the drive and re-partition it but no luck. There are no partitions showing at all. When I try to erase it comes up with an "Input/Output Error". When I try to partition it gives the same "Input/Output Error".

I want to find out what's happened. Is this external drive totally dead or what?

It doesn't sound good but there may be a way around it.

Do you have a Windows machine or access to a Windows machine with a Firewire port (maybe a laptop with iLink port)? If so you may be able to run some tests or at least format it. I've had troubles sometimes with Mac not formatting a drive but using Windows then reformatting as a Mac partition worked.

Yup, I'll brush the cobwebs off my windows m/c and try what you suggested.

I'll let you know how I got on...

Don't forget that it needs to have a Firewire port unless the drive also has USB in which case just use that.

Well, update is that Windows formatted it ok - said the drive was healthy. Popped it back into Mac and tried to format as a Mac partition but it failed.

What has happened to it to cause this? Is there something else I can try, or should I return it to the shop?

How are you formatting?

Are you removing the partitions then erasing or just trying to erase?

If trying to erase try removing the partitions entirely then create a single partition and erase as an Extended (Journaled) partiton.

Failing that it might pay to get someone to have a look at the drive.

Sorry I can't be of more help but these sorts of problems can be tricky to resolve without someone there seeing exactly what's going on.

I'm having no luck.

I've tried erasing the partition, creating a new one (mac os extended journaled), but whatever I do the message is the same - Input/output error.

The partition that Windows created has now disappeared, so all that is showing is the drive with no partitions.

Try another lead.

It might be a broken lead.

Failing that it might be a faulty controller board on the drive that's causing all the problems.

Can a faulty controller board be fixed?

I tried another lead and also daisy-chained it to another ext hard drive - all with no change to the result.

How old is the drive?

If it's still in warranty take it back to the store and get them to get it replaced under warranty.

If it is out of warranty it is definitely cheaper to get a new drive rather than get the board replaced.