Backup hung now external drive not showing up

[Arathorn_7]

Ok. I'm a newbie to both Mac and SuperDuper. I am a windows power user and consider myself an expert computer user.

I have an external Iomega USB2.0/Firewire 400 250 GB drive. It is connected to my iMac through the Firewire port.

I did a backup last night (manually kicked it off) with SuperDuper to the Mac OS Extended (journaled) partition I had created on the Iomega drive.

I got on this morning and there was a message there. I can't remember what it said, but it was a harmless message (i.e. did not indicate anything failed or anything like that.) After saying ok to the message I clicked on OK on the super duper window.

Then it seemed to hang, Finder somehow got hung, I couldn't use spotlight to get to anything. Tried force quit several times to no avail. Finally, I did a forced shutdown.

When I turned the iMac back on, my two partitions from the external drive are gone from the desktop!!!

I disconnected the firewire, reconnected, and it doesn't see the drive now. Please help!!

[Arathorn_7]

Ok. I got it to work. I'll reply how here in case somebody else has a similar issue.

I shutdown the iMac. Disconnected the firewire. I then replaced the firewire with the USB on the Iomega drive (not plugged into the Mac at this point.)

I restarted the Mac. Connected the USB. The drives showed up.

I then shutdown again. Disconnected the USB. Connected the firewire again (again not on the mac side yet.) Restarted. Connected the firewire to mac. Now they are there.

It's possible switching to the USB was unneccessary and the shutdown - disconnect - restart - connect sequence would have done the trick.

I'm learning. :)

[dnanian]

Yeah, it sounds like the Iomega drive hung up. Could be that you have a bad spot on the disk that caused the controller to stop responding. Have you considered erasing and zeroing the drive?