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iMac won't boot! Please help!
- Thread starter nicnic77
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I'm off to bed as well, but good luck! I'll check back tomorrow
Night fella, thanks again.
In Disk Utility I see the external drive, with the two partitions Time Machine and Leopard.
Beneath that I see a drive called Media, and the DVD drive. Media has a total capacity if 0 Bytes.
Edit: tried again can see the disk, but its greyed out in disk util. Wonder if there is a way to wirelessly copy my files to my macbook?? Or even direct copy to the external drive?
Beneath that I see a drive called Media, and the DVD drive. Media has a total capacity if 0 Bytes.
Edit: tried again can see the disk, but its greyed out in disk util. Wonder if there is a way to wirelessly copy my files to my macbook?? Or even direct copy to the external drive?
Any more luck since then mate? I think your best bet is still using Target Disk Mode, if you can get your paws on a Firewire cable...
Any more luck since then mate? I think your best bet is still using Target Disk Mode, if you can get your paws on a Firewire cable...
Morning fella. I tried a couple more things before calling it a night. Tried to mount the disk, tried verifying and repairing disk permissions - but all of those things failed. I will go buy a firewire cable at lunch, but I'm worried that the disk won't be available since it can't be mounted? After that there is the DiskWarrior option, and then after that Archive and Install. Can't see any other way forward!
Gutted.
Well i was hoping to come back to this & you had it sorted but it looks like that isn't the case, you say your worried about the disk not being mounted but I'm pretty certain you can still get data off it using diskwarrior otherwise how else would be it possible. Anyways I'm no expert on this matter as i haven't had a drive fail on me yet well at least not without backup anyways. Please don't forget to report back with any news
So, when I left the system last night I was able to boot up the Leopard installer from the external drive no problem. I spoke to all the guys at work and from that I planned my method of attack. I borrowed a second external drive and decided I would install OSX onto that, and then with a huge amount of luck I'd be able to see the faliling drive from within the OS.
Obviously some schadenfreude force saw fit to put an end to that idea, so now I can't boot up the Leopard installer from the external at all... It loads for a bit, but eventually the Mac nonchalantly switches itself. This is infuriating! Especially so, considering I don't have any dual layer DVD's from which to burn a psychical copy from.
The saga continues...
Obviously some schadenfreude force saw fit to put an end to that idea, so now I can't boot up the Leopard installer from the external at all... It loads for a bit, but eventually the Mac nonchalantly switches itself. This is infuriating! Especially so, considering I don't have any dual layer DVD's from which to burn a psychical copy from.
The saga continues...
In Verbose Mode I get:
disc0s2: I/O error
And then some quick messages about syncing, and CPU halting before it shuts itself off. Before I did anything tonight I plugged in the new external drive and checked to see if it was visible, it was, so I rebooted with the new external connected and got the black window. Seems coincidental that plugging in another drive perhaps changed the boot order, or something? Or surely to god the external drive hasn't died too..
disc0s2: I/O error
And then some quick messages about syncing, and CPU halting before it shuts itself off. Before I did anything tonight I plugged in the new external drive and checked to see if it was visible, it was, so I rebooted with the new external connected and got the black window. Seems coincidental that plugging in another drive perhaps changed the boot order, or something? Or surely to god the external drive hasn't died too..
"option" key boot soon solved that I saw two disks, Macintosh HD and Leopard. So both drives are visible and I'm back in the installer. I'm beginning to think I'm writing this for therapy.
Even more strangely the Macintosh HD has automagically mounted itself and all of the readouts for it look as they should.
Even more strangely the Macintosh HD has automagically mounted itself and all of the readouts for it look as they should.
When I hold down option I get the BootCamp style menu where I can choose which disc to boot up from. The internal drive shows up fine, but if I try and boot into it I eventually just get a black screen and the Mac turns itself off. The other option is the external hard disk which when selected boots into the Leopard Installer as it should. I had boot camp for a while, but deleted the partition a while ago as Windows stopped booting up anymore!
What about booting into the Leopard installation on the external drive, and then copying your data from the iMac on to the external?
Hmm I tried that last night after figuring out some of the terminal commands, but I wasn't able to browse the internal drive at that point. I/O error iirc. Perhaps that was because the disk wasn't mounted, and now that it is, it could work.
Leopard is currently installing on the new external drive but has 1.2 hrs to complete! If I can at least boot into that then hopefully I can do something with the drive since it is allegedly mounted?
Oh, that didn't go too well... Leopard installed and setup fine, and it mounted the iMac HD on the desktop. Applications, Libraries everything at a quick glance seems to be here. Unfortunately, my Home directory is completely empty and this where all my data was. Any suggestions?!
Get Info on the HD reveals the file sizes are all as they should be. Why would my home folder just vanish, and why would it suddenly stop booting? I'm completely stumped now!
Get Info on the HD reveals the file sizes are all as they should be. Why would my home folder just vanish, and why would it suddenly stop booting? I'm completely stumped now!
Pretty sure I didn't have that enabled. I remember going through the options some time ago and thinking that it could do more harm than good..
I have no idea, but if File Vault was on would the folder get hidden or would it display some kind of icon dignifying that it is locked?
I don't know, I'm afraid. Just to clarify, if you Get Info on the Home folder, does it say there's anything in there?
Well I'm back on the case today..
I've booted into Single User Mode and the internal drive is mounted. When I type:
cd "/volumes/Macintosh HD"
ls
One thing is returned:
.autodiskmounted
I had expected to be able to browse this directory?? No clue what .autodiskmounted means or is...
I've booted into Single User Mode and the internal drive is mounted. When I type:
cd "/volumes/Macintosh HD"
ls
One thing is returned:
.autodiskmounted
I had expected to be able to browse this directory?? No clue what .autodiskmounted means or is...
I think I've exausted all options now.. Ran DiskWarrior and rubuilt the directory structure, which completed sucessfully and fixed a lot of errors.. A new Macintosh HD was created but after previewing all of the files, none of my critical files where there. Applications and System files annoyingly all present and correct.
So, I've got a quote from a data recovery centre of £200. I'll pay whatever if they can actually get back the past 8 weeks of my life! Not holding out much hope.
Has anybody got any experience of the results seen by professional data recovery places?
So, I've got a quote from a data recovery centre of £200. I'll pay whatever if they can actually get back the past 8 weeks of my life! Not holding out much hope.
Has anybody got any experience of the results seen by professional data recovery places?
disk0s2
hey I know I'm replying to an old thread but is there any chance anyone knows what happened as I have the exact same problem and am not sure what to do, I'm going to go into the apple shop tomorrow, I backed all my files up apart from on folder which is the one I need, help!!
hey I know I'm replying to an old thread but is there any chance anyone knows what happened as I have the exact same problem and am not sure what to do, I'm going to go into the apple shop tomorrow, I backed all my files up apart from on folder which is the one I need, help!!