[SledgeHammer]

I know there is another thread with nearly the same title, but this does not seem to be the same issue, so I figured a new thread was appropriate.

I came home today and tried to open iTunes. My internal HD is tiny, so all of my music is on my external. iTunes said it sou;ldn't locate the iTunes Music folder. I went and looked for it. The containing folder was there and beneath it said "3 items" but opening that folder revealed exactly nothing. Nothing inside of it at all. I closed it, opened it again, still nothing. Just then, kernal panic.
I restarted and now the FW drive isn't mounted at all. I checked Disk Utility, the drive showed up, but wasn't mounted. IU clicked "mount," but no joy. I tried to repair disk. Wouldn't do it:

Disk Utility stopped repairing "The Hulk" because the following error was encountered: The underlying task reported failure on exit

also

Verify and Repair disk “The Hulk” Invalid Volume Header Checking HFS Plus volume. Checking Extents Overflow file. Checking Catalog file. Incorrect block count for file Temp File 3 (It should be 1479 instead of 0) Invalid record count Volume check failed. Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit 1 HFS volume checked 1 volume could not be repaired because of an error

I ran Drive 10. All of its tests passed except for "Spare Sectors" was unavailable and "Surface Scan" which failed. Surface scan checks for bad blocks. It recommended backing up and reformatting. Of course, I don't have anywhere to backup too, but it won't even matter if I can't get the drive to mount.

Any help is appreciated. The most important stuff on the drive is backed up, but since this drive is four times the capacity of my internal, most of the data on it (including all of my music) is not.

[FFL]

Drive 10 didn't offer any repair options?

I'm fairly sure DiskWarrior would fix this right up.

[turtle]

^^
What he said. DW.

[SledgeHammer]

Trying it. It's spent most of the afternoon so far "Rebuilding Directory." I am hopeful that the long time it is taking is not a bad sign, but not very.

[Brad]

Yeah, rebuilding the directory tree can take a *long* time. It ran overnight to repair a 60 GB drive of mine a couple years ago.

[turtle]

Yeah, just the fact that it's still working at fixing your drive is a good sign. I'm guessing it'll come out of this okay and without data loss.

[Brad]

And even if it looks like it's stuck, keep waiting. Give it plenty of time.

[SledgeHammer]

OK, so I ran DiskWarrior. It found something like 1500 overlapped files and fixed any number of other issues. I replaced the directory with the rebuilt one and was able to copy a few things off the drive. I later had to restart and when I did, the drive was gone again. I bought a new hard drive and, after it came, re-ran DW. It finished this morning. This time, I haven't replaced the directory. I am trying to copy files using the preview disk. The thing is, it takes forever to do anything. I tried to copy a large batch of filed over to the new drive, but after a minute or so it hung, then after many more minutes, told me that the copy couldn't be completed. So I decided to copy in small batches. Taking what I really needed to backup and leaving the expendable stuff. So I opened the first folder to start picking items to copy. That was about 45 minutes ago. The finder beachballed. I let it go and a moment ago it finally seemed to be showing the full contents of the folder. It even brought the window (and a couple others) to the front, registering clicks I'd made ages ago. Then it promptly beachballed again.

Basically, at this point, I want to know if there's anything I else I can/should do before I pay someone to do this for me. At the rate it's going right now, it will take me all year to back up my data.

[turtle]

It's a long process to do what you're doing. If you don't have the time then you might want to pay someone else to do it for you.