Help! Need Data from HD!

[RandyJS]

Hey everyone!

I need alittle help... My powerbook G4 17" is not starting up, all I get is a blank gray screen, and have tried reparing the disk, and the disk persmissions but am getting a catalog B-Tree error that will not rebuild.

I am afraid of loosing all of my data if i erase the drive and reinstall everything. Is there anyway I would be able to save my data?

I do have an external USB 200 GB hard drive that I could back it up to, but I do not know how to back it up because my computer will not start! Is there anything I can do to back it up in disk utitility?

I tried installing OSX to the external drive and booting from my external USB drive, but I cannot seem to make the computer access the USB drive to boot from there...

Any help would be appreciated! I AM getting SOO nervous because I have a full hard drive of data that I cannot loose!

THanks,
Randy

 

[Redline13]

OS X is only bootable from a firewire drive. Try to borrow a friends or pick up an inexpensive one.

 

[RandyJS]

OK i managed to load OSX onto my ipods hd and boot from there... now, is there anyway i can save the data on my hard drive?

are there any good utitlities that may be able to repair it?

Thanks,
randy

 

[OutThere]

Try as much as you can not to write anything to the drive...that would be a bad move in this case.

If the drive mounts when you boot from the iPod, then try to just copy what you can from your hard drive to the iPod, start with the absolute most important things (things that you created yourself), then move to less important items (stuff you have or can get easily elsewhere).

If the drive doesn't mount when you boot from your iPod you are in a bit of a more desperate situation...you can try some of the disk utilities, like DiskWarrior (http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/), or you can send you computer to people such as DriveSavers (http://www.drivesavers.com/) who will charge by the gig to save your data...if you want to pay, they're good at what they do. You might want to consider how important your data was before sending it off like that, you might end up spending a lot to save stuff that's not entirely important.

 

[RandyJS]

My hard drive is not mounting to the desktop and diskwarrior says the drive is too severely damaged

Are there any other applications that MAY be able to recover some of my data?

I have irreplaceable pictures and family things on the computer that really mean a lot to me, that I have not backed up...

Please let me know if there is anythign else I can do before sending it out for a repair.

Thanks again

 

[OutThere]

You can Google for different data recovery programs, but really they won't work if you can't mount the drive and can't do anything with DiskWarrior...at this point your best bet is to say "that's life" and move on, or to try a service like DriveSavers.

 

[Makosuke]

If you haven't already given up, check out Data Rescue--it's saved stuff off of completely toasted drives that even DiskWarrior couldn't do anything with.

You can see what files are recoverable before you pay for it, so there's nothing to loose. Have a look over at VersionTracker to download a copy.