Help! Friend's G4 not starting up

[elanvitale]

I need additional advice. I am attempting to fix a friend's Mac G4 tower (first generation - still has 9.0.4 installed) and it is not continuing past the Happy Mac during startup. There is a very corrupt file that has garbage characters in the file size field and causes the computer to bomb even when attempting to get info much less delete.

I performed maintenance and afterwards zapped the PRam to try and fix it, and that's when the startup began to stall. Norton Utilities (which he has installed but doesn't have the disc) is finding major problems in the B-Tree headers and alternate volume headers as well as with that file. It also has 564 crosslinked files that it cannot fix. This drive is a mess, but I at least need to get it booted up so I can back up his data.

Any advice?

Thanks!
Elan

 

[rainman::|:|]

sounds like you've got a hell of a drive problem. if norton or a similar program won't fix it (you may need to buy a CD, as this would be most helpful in this case), you'll need to reformat and reinstall the OS-- it sounds like part of the OS is corrupt or missing. You may be able to salvage files if you can get started up from another volume-- you may need to install the drive in another computer to do this... it's probably what i would do.

you may be able to start up from the restore discs and simply reinstall the OS, preserving the rest of the disk. but with this much corruption, you'll probably need to reformat (to segment off the bad blocks if it's a physical error) at some point... this method may gain you enough time to backup important files and apps...

pnw