I had a pretty miserable experience lately and I wanted to share the simple lesson I learned. I have an external FW/USB2 drive case into which I swap a few ATA drives. It was unplugged for a while and when I plugged it back in, I used the FW cable which came with my 1G iPod. The long white one. Anyway, All the drives I plugged into the case appeared unmountable, or unreadable, or unverifiable/repairable (Disk Utility), or unrecoverable (Data Rescue), or unfixable (DiskWarrior). I was not happy. Long story short, I replaced the cable with another one and everything returned to normal. It was such a huge relief. So, kids, when you experience krazy external drive behavior, don't rule out the cable (even a cable which seems to work normally, say, tranferring songs to a 1G iPod.)

Those cables that come with the iPod are useless for real work.
You are not the first person to have this problem.
Not enough twist in the conductors, tons of data errors.

BGnR

where were you a month ago with that key information, hmmmm?