External drive woes...

[chadrob30]

20" aluminum iMac with a 320 GB My Book disc hooked up via firewire. Well, I was messing around with permissions and managed to lock myself out of this drive. It doesn't even show up on the desktop, but shows to be mounted in Disk Utility. Any ideas how to get this drive accessible again? TIA...

 

[Big-TDI-Guy]

Log out and back into OSX.

Unplug the firewire and reconnect.

Press the button on your WD.

Unplug the WD power and plug back in.

I'm not sure if you get any errors when trying to write or read large files on the WD - but if you do, reformat it. Mine was slow, and gave me a ton of errors - until I reformatted. Works like a charm now.

 

[chadrob30]

Here are a couple screenshots of Darwin and Disk Utility right after I did a repair:

 

[chadrob30]

Fixed!!! Got a tip on another forum to run this command in Terminal and it worked. sudo chmod 777 /Volumes/My\ Book

 

[Big-TDI-Guy]

Yeah fine, go talk to smart people, get your problem fixed. I see how it is.

 

[wakerider017]

Why are you playing around in terminal if you don't know what your doing?

 

[Big-TDI-Guy]

My guess is, he's playing around in terminal, because someone who knows about terminal is telling him how. He trusts this person, and it appears to have worked.

But yeah, many things can go really wrong, really fast if you don't know what you're doing in terminal.

 

[chadrob30]

Yeah fine, go talk to smart people, get your problem fixed. I see how it is.

LOL! I actually posted here and at broadbandreports.com simultaneously, and they were the first to answer. No big deal.

 

[chadrob30]

Why are you playing around in terminal if you don't know what your doing?

I had guidance from a reputable source, my drive is going again and all is well. Does it matter?