I bought that drive specifically because it had a great reputation for being plug and play with Macs. Figured from all the positive reviews that I wouldn't need to update the firmware...

It's taken me months to save enough for the drive and have it and a OSX dvd brought down to Belize, so I'm kinda stuck with it. You can't just buy that kind of thing off the shelf here. It seems to work perfectly until it tries to create a series of temporary disks on startup and then dies with the error above. I'll try to get the a more complete boot log later.

Neither fsck nor Disk Utility report any errors with the drive.