I have an external HDD with FW400/800 and USB 2.0

It appears that Ext3 partition will not mount, but I'm confused as to why the mac will not even see the Fat32 partition? Disk Utility times out, and if I try to mount Ext3 with this program, it also times out. An extremely annoying event happens after timeout, The Activity Monitor shoots up 80-90% CPU for the linux mount program, and I have to force quit within Activity Monitor.