FW drive - partition disapeared?

I have a LaCie D2 120gig, which is partitioned into 3 X 40G (1-Sessions 2- Audio 3-Samples), but now when I boot up, I get a message "the disc cannot be read - Eject or Initialize?". I choose eject so I can carry on with the OS boot, and the SAMPLES partition is not on the desktop anymore, just gone... Now, does this mean it's gone forever, or is there any way to get it back? I don't know what could have caused this, perhaps the partition got corrupted? Can Disk Warrior or similar app help, and if so, how do I get it to see a drive that doesn't show up!??! Man that would suck, I had 20 gigs worth of loops and samples on that thing, some is backed up to cd, thankfully. Any help appreciated...

pk .......... sounds like the directory on the disk may be corrupt. I'd definitely try to run Disk Warrior from the CD. It recently saved my system drive after a crash, where my system would only show a question mark on a folder and would not boot. It ended up the system folder directory was corrupt and needed to be rebuilt. Does the drive sound the same?? No obvious grinding noises? Did you try to rebuild the desktop file for the drive? Is everything critical on the drive backed-up? If it's backed up, maybe you could reformat it and copy your stuff back to it. How much space is left on it?? Good Luck with it. Tony

I've had this problem occur to me three times. The first time, I lost everything on that FW drive by initializing it after checking it with Drive 10(OSX) and the Disk Utility(on both OS9 and OSX) The second time, I bought DataRescue(OSX) and retreived all my files and backed them up to other drives. The third time, I didn't have sufficient time to retrieve and backup my files using DataRescue. I unhooked all of my FW drives and devices and rearranged the order of the chain of the HD's and after a reboot everything was fine. I will suggest DataRescue for a clear solution when all else fails but always check your connections before you do anything drastic(like re-initializing the drive!) I hope this helps.

Thanks for your replies. I ran Disk Warrior from the CD, but to my disapointment, it did not see this missing partition called "samples". It saw everything else (Mac1, Mac2, SESSIONS and AUDIO) but not the one that may have been corrupted. Where the hell did it go? If there's anything Im overlooking that may help me, any other suggestions are welcome. p.s. The FW disc sounds fine, no grinding noise whatsoever, everything else on it is intact.

Just thought I'd let you know that the problem is now fixed. Just so happens that DW in OSX could see the damaged partition while it wouldn't in OS9, which is what I'm still running. I just took the LaCie to a friend's place and we took care of it there, it was just a bunch of corrupted files from a sample CD I had recently extracted. Thanks for all your help.

Good for you bro' ........ it's always a "WHEW" moment when you get that stuff cleared up!