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Jovian9

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 19, 2003
1,967
110
Planet Zebes
Today my hard drive started clicking on my Rev A 17" 1.8GHz iMac G5. This happened before, I think back in January and Apple charged me $50 to tell me how to resolve the clicking (since I was out of my 90 day phone support warranty). They had me take the back off and reset the pram and said that it was a software issue, so I had to pay them $50 since I do not have the 3 year AppleCare warranty. Well, it did resolve the issue for about 2 weeks. But it occassionally would still do it. I did not want to keep paying them $50 to call and complain about what I perceived as a failing hard drive. Well today while transferring some data from one partition to another, it hung up. I let it hang for 30 minutes before I manually powered it off (nothing else worked). I cannot restart it. There is no start up disk recognized. When I boot from the Panther, Tiger, or iMac G5 software disks it doesn't even see the internal iMac G5....it's just not there. Has anyone had this problem? Is this a dead hard drive? If so, is there any software out there that I can use to grab all of my data from it. I bought a firewire drive tonight, and am going to install OSX onto it and boot the iMac from it. But I want to be able to somehow retrieve my years of data from this iMac (but it's not recognized for your usual transfers or Carbon Copy Cloning). I ran the disk check from the original iMac G5 disks and everything came back okay (motherboard, memory, hard drive). So I'm at a loss of what to do. I'm still under my 1 year warranty, so they will replace it if it is faulty. But I really want to get the info off of it first (and safari bookmarks, documents, etc.). Any help would be super appreciated. Thanks!
 

Jovian9

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Feb 19, 2003
1,967
110
Planet Zebes
So I bought a firewire drive tonight (western digital). I partitioned the hard drive and installed tiger on the first 80gb's and when asked to do so I allowed the transfer of files from my original start up partition on my dead hard drive (it suprised me that this was recognized). But during the transfer of files it hung up at 21 minutes remaining. I powered off and restarted but could not boot OSX. I installed tiger again (on the other 80gb partition) and during the OSX setup I skipped the transfer of files and went straight to OSX. It seems like I was able to recover a majority of the files from my startup partition but none from my other 2 partitions (can't find these partitions).
But........
When the iMac was booted with the tiger disk I was able to use system profiler and disk utility to recognize the firewire hard drive, but not the internal iMac hard drive. Now that I'm up and running with OSX (booted from the firewire drive 2nd partition) I can no longer see the hard drives (any of them). I've ran disk utility, system profiler, system preferences - start up disk and they are nowhere but on my desktop. If I try to install something I have no drives to install onto, even though I'm running OSX right now. This makes me wonder if the problem is not with the hard drive at all but with something else since it is now starting to not recognize my external (brand new) hard drive.
Any suggestions? Thanks!
 
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