Disk Crash

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Disk Crash
by Glenn Pniewski on Aug 21, 2008 at 7:34:14 am

G4 Quicksilver 867MHz
1.5GB RAM
OSX 10.4

Hi all,

Hope you can help me recover. Have a boot drive on the above machine, and had only about 8GB free out of 75GB (I use external firewire drives for FCP media). Anyway, things have been getting sluggish and problematic, so I ran Techtools . . .did the whole suite of tests and did an optimization, which ran for 10 hours. When the optimization was done, I closed Techtools. . .and I couldn't reboot at all. Gray screen kept telling me to reboot, but it never got past that screen.

I popped in DiskWarrior, and it only took 15 seconds for it to tell me that "another utility program" had damaged too many files for a rebuilding to even be possible.

Is there any way, any way at all I can fix this? I was going to add a bigger internal drive anyway, but apparently not soon enough to Carbon Copy Clone everything over.

Please, I've got to be able to get at that boot drive. . .or at least some of the photo files I have on there -

Thanks so much,
Glenn

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Re: Disk Crash
by Kevin Camp on Aug 21, 2008 at 3:41:22 pm

you need to get that drive on a bootable system to see if you can access the drive and it's files. if you can access that drive then you should be able to copy over many of the files to another drive.

you could put the drive into another mac that has a working boot drive... i think the quicksilvers were ata drives, so you'd need to install the drive in a mac with an ata bus. another quicksilver would be ideal, but you may be able to pop it in a newer g5 or macpro (which have sata for hard drives) if you use the optical bay bus.

if you don't have another system to use, then buying that new larger drive and installing the os on that should work. place the new drive in the location of the current drive, then place the current drive in an available drive bay. boot from the os install disk and install the system software on the new drive. reboot and see if you can access the old drive's files.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

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Re: Disk Crash
by Gary Milligan on Aug 21, 2008 at 4:06:17 pm

Kevin's suggestion is certainly one way to go, but there is another (isn't there always?) If you have access to another Mac try connecting them via firewire and starting up your drive in Target Disk Mode. A much quicker way to see if your files can be accessed. Good luck.

Gary

This is me - this is what I do - http://web.mac.com/garymmw

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Re: Disk Crash
by Glenn Pniewski on Aug 21, 2008 at 4:32:27 pm

Thanks folks. . .in the overnight rescue (since my panic attack), I have installed the new drive, loaded OSX 10.4 onto it, and will attempt to access the old boot drive and pull those files.

Serves me right for tinkering with the old boot drive BEFORE adding the new one. Stupid stupid STUPID! But, who would have thought using Techtools would have destroyed the drive??

Thanks again,
Glenn

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