HD Crashed - How to replace file system?

[Done-on-a-Mac]

Hello all,

I was bringing my iMac G5, 10.4.11 with latest updates, out of sleep mode with my external HD attached. My screen blinked a few times then came out of sleep mode with a dialog box saying to initialize the drive. I believe the file system(NTFS) got corrupted because this happened to me on another computer(Windows XP) about 5 years ago. I just replaced the file system & all was well.

How would I go about replacing just the file system to access the files again but not erasing the drive? Is there another way that might help?

I have run Onyx to see if that would fix any problems with my iMac & it did fix some problems, but now the dialog box doesn't show up anymore when I plug the external drive into the iMac & nothing appears on the desktop after an hour of waiting.

I have access(company software) to Tech Tool Pro 4 & Diskwarrior 3(both up to date) for OSX Tiger, would those be of any help at this point? Am I s.o.l. with this?

 

[BlueRevolution]

Macs only have limited (read-only) NTFS support. You may have more luck repairing the filesystem from a PC. In fact, when my Windows partition crashes while my NTFS external drive is attached, it won't mount on Mac until I've booted to Windows again. On boot, Windows automatically fixes the problem, and everything is okay on the Mac side once again.

I'm not saying that's certain to happen in your case, but if you're dealing with NTFS you should really be doing so from a PC.

 

[r.j.s]

^^^ Agreed.

Since the drive is NTFS, only a XP/Vista machine can help you.