[nmglug] drive problems

[BrianO'Keefe]

Hi all.
Some of you may remember my firewire drive saga. It's still ongoing but
I may have figured something out.
Briefly it's 3 partitions created with OS X disk utility. All 3 mount in
Linux but 1, the 1 I need, does not mount in OS X.
I don't really care if it does or doesn't but the issue is that I can't
access any of the files in the 3rd partition. It's 6GB and has 104MB
space remaining. I was getting I/O errors so I did a bit of googling and
found that too full drives can give these errors.
I thought to delete some files and see if that allowed me to copy or
view the remaining ones but even if I run a file manager
(gnome-commander) as root I can't delete or move anything as I get a
"read only" error.
How can I mount this partition as rw so I can get rid of some excess
crap and get to the files I need?
I did take the drive to DotFoil and they tried extracting data via
software but no luck and referred me to a data recovery service which
would cost some $1500!!!!!
I think the partition is too full, maybe, as the drive works fine
otherwise and makes no weird sounds and has spent most of its life not
even plugged in. I've probably mounted the drive less than 20 times.
It's a 40GB LaCie pocket drive.
I'm running a dual boot Powerbook OS X/Ubuntu Dapper.
Many thanks in advance!!
viva la revolucion!
Brian