Mac OS X forum: external hard drive won't mount

The external HD is a WD My Passport Essential, USB, 250 GB.
I've been using this ext HD for a little over a year, primarily on this MacBook (Mac OS X 10.5.8) that it will not connect to now. It still has about 220 GB of available space.

Everything worked perfectly fine up until last week but now it won't mount. When it would mount, it would show up on the desktop and under Devices.

I am not sure how to determine the permissions for the ext HD.

I am able to get information about the ext HD in Disk Utility. It appears in the sidebar under the Macintosh HD. The ext HD icon appears with "298.1 GB WD 3200BMV External Media" next to it. Underneath that and slightly indented shows the ext HD icon again next to the title of the drive, "Untitled" (because I never formatted it with a title), but it is in faded type.

As this is a personal computer, my account is the Administrator account.

Thanks for helping me out. I didn't even know what questions to ask myself so that I could give adequate information about my problem.
Please let me know if there's anything else I can elaborate on to better diagnose the issue.

I use it 99% of the time on this Macbook. But I also use it to transfer files to and from my iMac or even less often to and from Macs at school. I have not done this recently though and this has never caused a problem before.

When the ext HD would not mount on my Macbook, I did check to see if it would mount on the iMac but it would not show up on the desktop or the Disk Utility.

It is not formatted to switch from Macs to PCs so therefore I have never connected it to a PC.

It is formatted for a Mac OS X (Journaled).

Unfortunately, I do not have a backup.

I am in total recovery mode. Meaning I'm less concerned about salvaging the hardware and completely concentrated on recovering my files.

I have tried making a new disk image on a separate drive. I have also tried to repair in Disk Utility but it will not work because the ext HD will not mount.

So I'm basically looking for solutions on how to get the external HD to mount again or how to recover files from a drive that won't mount.

Thanks again for all your help.

I don't think so, Disk Warrior only recognises ext and int drives, but can't rebuild external drives, its a useless program for fixing ext drives with corrupted structures.

Warrior let's you create a bootable CD at which point it can rebuild structures on any disk (that is not completely destroyed).
...recover files?, I don't think so and the rebuild may connect all the pointers. Thereafter, backup somewhere, get a second external. If extremely important spend the mula for a RAID1.

Good luck.

I get this often using my MBP and WD 1gb via USB.

I have the drive not mount, the disc it visible in Disc Utility but cannot mount the volume. I could here the disc work away, and finally ejected the disc. It mounted again and mounted the volume this time.

1tb rather.