working on a mac pro 10.5.7.

was just transferring files from one disk to another while opening a final cut project from a third disk. during the process a gray curtain closed from top to bottom of my screen witha message that somethiing serious had happened and that i needed to restart my system by holding the power button in.

i did the hard shutdown. i then restarted. everything is normal except that the disk with the final cut material on it did not mount, or so it seems.

i opened disk utility and the disk does appear there. it seems to have no partition info, though. the volume name is missing. i looked to mount it, just to see what the options might be, but the mount button is gray. i tried the eject button and, after a short wait, got the message that it could not be ejected and to make sure nothing was using it or something like that.

at this point i figured it would be prudent to stop and look into what recovery options there might be. so...

anybody got any tips as to this sort of data recovery/disk repair on a mac? on a pc i'd grab a live cd and boot to it to poke around but booting a mac is a bit different. is a live cd an option here?

thanks,
BabaG

I am only aware of few options :
Using the repair option of the disk utility
If you ever buy it the diskwarrior.
You also can try to use fsck from the command line , although sometimes it comes up rather strange messages
But maybe somebody comes up with a better idea

There is no difference between running fsck under Disk Utility and running it on the command line except that if you run it yourself from the command line then you had better pick the right version to match the file system that is on the target volume, i.e fsck_hfs for HFS variants or, fsck_msdos for a FAT variant, etc.

If fsck, doesn't recover the volume for you, then your only real option is to use DiskWarrior which is extremely thorough at recovering damaged systems. Any further advice would depend on you telling us what the volume format/file system of the damaged volume was.

KFS

damaged disk is hfs+.

and thanks for the replies so far.

BabaG