Serious issue is troubling me:
1) I have an external usb harddisk, on which I have 3 partitions. 1)ntfs (for windows) 2)mac partition 3)fat (for linux).
Few days ago I changed the fat to ntfs also for backing up bigger size files of linux.
The disk has suddenly stopped working. I pulled it out of windows when it was off and put it in mac and mac gave me the option to 1)initialize, 2)ignore, 3)eject and it shows up on diskutility,but I can't get it to open.
on windows systems when it was working I was using macdrive to move files to/from the mac partition.
I don't know what has caused it to malfunction, but it gets recognized by mac / windows but both of them refuse to open it.
in windows when i can hear it plugging in and plugging out, and I can see it in the storage media (if I right click my computer and click manage) but disk management says I need to initialize it, but when i try doing that, it just says, some kind of I/O error happened.
I also uninstalled the usb drivers from vista, uninstalled macdrive, installed a SPTD drive, but nothing has worked so far.
I know the data is there on the disk, but somehow it just does not connect to both windows / mac. it's like someone is at their door, but does not know how to open the door to enter into their home. If i click on safely remove icon, i can also see it listed there and it removes it successfully.
Please help anyone, there are tonnes of books that I spent weeks (... ahem...) downloading and sorting and categorizing and doing the same work again will simply drain half my life out of me. please i really need suggestions on fixing this problem? should I reinstall vista to see if the driver problem will be corrected? mac is freshly installed without support for ntfs I guess, but it should still read the mac partition fine. right?