Disk Utility and Installer don't see drive

[gwostrel]

OK - my 1st Gen dual 2ghz PowerMac G5 was acting a little strange - apps slow to launch, apps freezing at launch so I restarted. No change. I then noticed a second drive that I had installed and formatted to install Ubuntu PPC onto was not mounting. I figured it was time to boot with the Tiger install DVD and run Disk Utility. It would not even recognize either drive - it would just spin and never show and disks. Then I shut down and rebooted from my backup external drive. The primary drive on the G5 mounted on the Desktop (but not the other one) and I tried to run Disk Utility from there, but same result. I then shut down and pressed the hardware reset button on the motherboard. Turned it back on, booted from the DVD - same result. I even figured that I might as well just re-install OSX, but the installer never sees the drive as available.

Any experts with some help out there?

Thanks

[sash]

Hi,

Start with the most basic things: run fsck and / or DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior should normally do.

sash

PS -- is this second drive actually a separate HDD or a partition?

[gwostrel]

@sash

The second HDD is a physical drive in the second drive bay of the G5 tower. Formatted for Unix as I intended to install Ubuntu (just did not get around to it yet). I tried Disk Warrior when I was booted from my backup drive (Firewire 800 external) but it said that the drive was in use and I should try booting from the DW CD - which I did not try yet. Forgot about fsck - been a long time since I ran that. Isn't that the same thing as Disk First Aid (essentially), just from the command line? What is the command? "sudo fsck -y" or something like that?

[gwostrel]

just checked man fsck. maybe fsck -y is not the best course of action :rolleyes:

[Lesser Evets]

I second the DISK WARRIOR call.

If the drive is repairable, that will do it.

[gwostrel]

Yeah, I have always relied on DW. Its really odd that it did not work when I booted from the external drive and ran it from there. Plus, the drive works *ok*, but Utilities just don't seem to see it. I'll try fsck and booting from the DW disk directly when I return to the house.