Offtopic: How to fix an unmountable external harddisk in Mac OS X

So, I got this external drive which was not mountable anymore. The system log complained about a corrupted disk journal. Fire up Google and find this nice little article, which will give you your drive back (and you don’t have to buy expensive bloated disk utilities)—try mounting it writable, then ejecting via the OS X Disk Utility, unplug firewire cable and plug in again.

This should do it. Of course, if you’re not the adventurous type, try mounting it readonly and backup your data somewhere first. Thanks a lot, Christian Fries, this saved me one or two headaches.

UPDATE: I had this problem now once with 10.4 Tiger, and the Disk Utility repaired everything for me—no need to hack around in the Terminal anymore.