External drive PLEASE HELP!

[Aric Mannion]

My external firewire (Rocstor) hard drive is inaccessible, but it still "mounts"!!
I can see it in my disk utilities, I can even search the files that are on the drive! But when I select a file, it is an alias that I can't access. I tried clicking "repair disk" and it said "No repairs necessary"
The computer sees it but I cannot, and there is no way to access it.
This problem started when I selected "no access" (in get info) on a folder while something was writing to it. Then it said "read and write" but it was greyed out. I'm not sure if that's exactly what happened, It was really just a slip of my finger and then when I restarted, it was gone.
PLEASE help! This will be absolutely devastating if I lose this data. Is there any kind of maintenence that I can do? I don't know about this stuff.

[Bryan Daugherty]

Can you give us a little more info about your system?
Platform, OS, that kind of stuff...

[Aric Mannion]

power book G4 mac OS 10.4.11
Just to clarify I can't actually see the hard drive icon, but I know it has mounted because when I unplug it I get a warning that it was not properly ejected. Also I can see it in the disk utility, accept it says it has zero items and doesn't give me the info that it gives other drives. I just bought some data recovery program for $100 and am slowly copying the 800 gigs from the drive, -because the drive is totally fine, I JUST CAN'T ACCESS IT!
I am SURE that there is some type of standard maintenance that a person should try when their hard drive acts weird. But I can not find any information on what to try at all.

[Jeff Donald]

there are several things you can do to "save" the drive. many times if you boot off your install disk, you can run the repairs from Disk Utility, even though they can't be run from from the Start Up Disk. There is also a great program called Disk Warrior that is the standard for Macs that have directory errors. Please post back your progress and I'll try and help.

[Aric Mannion]

So I logged in as the "root" user, and the drive pops up perfectly fine with all the files. But logged in as me, the drive is no where to be found, even though I can see it in disk utility -which is telling me that the drive has zero files in it.
I don't even know what I am trying to do, I just want things to work normal. I'll try to run repairs again, I don't want to buy another program until I know what I would do with it.

[Jeff Donald]

OK, if you can see it in Root, but not your regular user account then you most likely have changed the user account permissions. When you are logged in as Root, click once on the drive, then press Command, I, to get info. The permissions for the drive should be as follows:

System: <Read & Write>

admin: <Read & Write>

everyone: <Read only>

If the settings are ghosted or locked, click on the Lock in the lower left corner and enter your admin password and change the settings to the above.

[Stelios Christofides]

Also what you can do is try and read it from another computer and see.

Stelios

[Aric Mannion]

Originally Posted by Jeff Donald

OK, if you can see it in Root, but not your regular user account then you most likely have changed the user account permissions. When you are logged in as Root, click once on the drive, then press Command, I, to get info. The permissions for the drive should be as follows:

System: <Read & Write>

admin: <Read & Write>

everyone: <Read only>

If the settings are ghosted or locked, click on the Lock in the lower left corner and enter your admin password and change the settings to the above.

Yeah the settings say read and write, but they are ghosted which is very odd! I didn't see any way to access them, or a "lock" -I'll look once more when I get home. I do suspect that my "User" is blocking my hard drive from my sight. I only have 1 user log in, but I suspect that there is an error with my user "permissions"? I just don't understand how computers work, I only know how to use it's applications.

[Aric Mannion]

Originally Posted by Jeff Donald

OK, if you can see it in Root, but not your regular user account then you most likely have changed the user account permissions. When you are logged in as Root, click once on the drive, then press Command, I, to get info. The permissions for the drive should be as follows:

System: <Read & Write>

admin: <Read & Write>

everyone: <Read only>

If the settings are ghosted or locked, click on the Lock in the lower left corner and enter your admin password and change the settings to the above.

That fixed it completely, you were right. Thanks, I would not have figured that out on my own -I noticed read and write were ghosted and left it at that. But when I hit the drop down below that, it actually said "no access".