just a thought, but can you copy from that drive to another drive? Maybe you can get the files off but its having problems reading and writing from the same drive?

On one of the machines, maybe the old tower running 10.5.x, it sometimes would mount the 2nd 2 partitions, and that seemed like it would give me a chance. That was when I tried copying a couple of the files, and it would give me errors. I don't remember if I finally got any of the files (these weren't the pictures that I wanted, but I was at least able to travel through a little of the file system), but it gave me a little hope.

And yes, I was transferring them to a different drive, so unfortunately it's not that easy.

321 Soft Data Recovery for Mac is at least giving me some info, including bad block listings that aren't just a blanket over all blocks scanned. It's the demo version, but if it finds files we'll buy it.

It is currently saying 8.2 days to scan the one partition. System Profiler says it's running at USB 2 speeds (it also shows all 3 partitions and their correct names!). This iMac is my only Mac with SATA inside, and I'm thinking about opening it up, putting in this drive, and booting off an external backup just to help speed up that time.

Ahhh, there's definitely times that having a tower is nice.

Aaron