>     Real quickly, I wanted to post a fix I performed just now so I’ll have it in the future. I did a stupid thing and tried to use Boot Camp to put a copy of Windows on Karisa’s iMac so that she could dual-boot and play MSN Games (it sounds dumb, I know – but it really is.) Somehow, either Boot Camp or the Windows boot disc toasted the computer and I had to reformat the hard drive and re-install OS X. Well, Karisa was okay with all this as long as nothing was wrong with her external hard drive, which has her pictures and music and stuff for iTunes on it.
     Well wouldn’t you know, for some reason, I couldn’t read that either. If I plugged it into the mac, it would tell me that it was unformatted and I had to format it. If I plugged it into Windows on my laptop, it would tell me it was unformatted and I had to format it. If I plugged it into Linux on my laptop, it didn’t see the drive at all. So what to do?
     I found a little utility called TestDisk that saved my life. I downloaded it from here. I had to rebuild the boot sector of the disk; according to TestDisk, without the boot sector, the disk is unreadable whether it’s bootable or not. Well ok! I went to “Advanced/Boot/RebuildBS” and confirmed, which fixed the boot sector, and what pops up? Explorer’s autorun prompt. Awesome! I win again.