Thank you to everyone who offered a suggestion to help, especially Ian_c. Disk Warrior did indeed work and I have managed to pull all my files off the drive. Yippee!! Disk warrior suggests it was a disk malfunction so I will be ditching the drive.
Many thanks

Glad it is sorted - Disk Warrior is an outstanding piece of kit and every Mac owner should have it.

Since Disk Utility can not see the drive how can I reformat it? I cant see any option in Disk Warrior to do it. Any idea?
Thanks

Sorry - I had misunderstood. I thought it was disk utility that had said it could not be repaired (Disk Warrior can often fix things that DU can't).

If it is not showing up in disk utility and Disk Warrior has let you rescue your data, then it sounds like the drive is kaput and you might as well ditch it

In reply to a post by ian_c:

If it is not showing up in disk utility and Disk Warrior has let you rescue your data, then it sounds like the drive is kaput and you might as well ditch it

Might perhaps be able to format the drive FAT32 with a Windows machine, before ditching it?

No, my fault. Yes Disk Utility does see the drive but I cant perform any action on it, hence the success of disk Warrior to get the info off it. I had hoped to delete all data before ditching the drive but I cant see how. If I can use Warrior to get data then so could someone else. Maybe Im being over paranoid!

sadly I cant get a pc to see the drive as accessible, though that was the same with the mac before disk warrior, so maybe if I play with some software.
cheers

If you are really worried about others getting data off the disc then physically destroy it first with a hammer.

Hmm. Might be worth get DW to repair permissions.

Does the partition tab in DU work (you have to select the whole disk, not just volumes)?

Or as Dick says, the old Birmingham Screwdriver treatment....

Edited by ian_c (Mon 24-Sep-12 16:01:26)

In reply to a post by matty_hunt:

sadly I cant get a pc to see the drive as accessible...

Not even from Start > My Computer > right click > Manage > Disk Management?