Hardrive Crashed AGAIN!! Please Help!

[swpowe]

Why is this happening to me!! I've always loved the stability of my Mac. Anyways...I was in the middle of editing a session I'd recorded last night when as I was trying to save my edit as an independant clip I got the spinning beach ball of death and then an error saying it couldn't write to my audio disk. At this point I was still able to play back my audio but couldn't save anything. I tried to save the entire session and then protools froze up then quit. I tried restarting protools but it would always unexpectatly quit. My external firewire hardrive (that i've been trying to save to) then wasn't mounted on the desktop. I tried to restart my computer but it froze forcing me to manually turn it off using the power button. Upon restart much to my joy (said with much sarcasm) my hardrive is not there at all and of course disk utility doesn't see it...can't fix it..can't do anything. this is the second time this has happened. Different hardrive...same general scenario. I can't have this happening.

I've got a 1.33ghz 12" powerbook with 768mb RAM
external 250 gig hardrive (maxtor) partitioned to 80 gig partitions

As per digi's recommendation my hardrive is connected directly to my powerbook and then the digi 002R is the last in the chain.
Is my powerbook bad? my 002R? Hardrive??? please help me out with this (i'm sure you can all sense the desperiation in my voice)
As always...thanks.

[cigam]

You need to be a little more specific.

What OS?

What PT version?

Does your firewire drive have the oxford 911 chipset?

Add some details to your post so everybody knows what you have?

Hope it all works out for you,
CIGAM

[swpowe]

Sorry
OS- 10.3.4
PT- 6.4
Not actually sure if it's got the oxford chipset. How can I check? All i've been able to find online is some of these specific drives do others do not. It's a maxtor drive in a metal gear usb2/firewire case.
I can't think of any other details....please let me know what more I can provide. Thanks!

[Randirainbow]

Try this! When you hear the chord on startup, hold down the command key while also holding down the s key. When you see the black and white screen appear let go of the keys. After the machine does it's thing you will have a small white box at the end of the dialog all in black and white. This is your command line interface for linux. Carefully type fsck -fy (eff ess see kay space minus eff why) then hit your return key and sit back while your hard drive fixes itself. This is a weekly routine for all of my boxes and has never let me down. When it finishes, you will have a dialog that says either "disk was modified" or the "drive appears to be ok". If the drive was modified, type fsck -fy again as many times as it takes untill you get "the drive appears to be ok". At that point type "reboot" in the little box and hit the return key again. Your machine will boot up. Then open disk utilities and run permissions repair. Restart. Hopefully your box will now be good to go. If this does not fix it, you may need a disk repair utility like Disk Warrior or Drive 10.

[Facts4U]

I had the same problem and this was the reason:
Make shure you have disconnected your iSight camera if you have one. The iSight cannot be used with any external firewire disks simultaniously. In my case Norton Disk Utility was able to recover the files on the damaged firewire disk.
Good luck! Julian.