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I've lost my hard drive in my G5! Need your suggestions.

neonart

neonart

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 4, 2002
1,066
67
Near a Mac since 1993.
I was getting some weird crashes in Safari for some reason on my Dual 2.0, so I repaired permissions and ran Mac Janitor. No bad permissions and MacJanitor ran just fine.
I though well, I'll restart and maybe it'll work itself out.

Thats when things went horribly wrong. As the machine tried to boot up it would get stuck at the grey Apple screen and not go anywhere. I pushed the power button until it turned off and tried to zap the PRAM. Same thing. Not good. Booted from OSX.3 CD and tried disk repair- not capable of fixing it. TechTool 4. Tried, but no dice.

Now the drive does not even show up as mounted. My data drive also shows to have some damage. But it's readable and looks to have accepted the Disk utility repairs. (I'm thinking a power surge or something may have caused the problems.

Here are my system specs:
RevA Dual 2.0, 1 GB CL2.5 RAM, Raptor 36GB 10K RPM HD (the really screwed up one), WD 160GB 7200RPM HD (not so screwed up, still readable), USB PCI card, Powermate, Soundsticks, iSight, Radeon 9800 OEM 128MB, Formac 2010.

I need to at least access the drive so I can try to save my stuff. The data on that drive has YEARS of emails, contacts, etc. Some is on .Mac, but alot is not.

Your help and suggestions are very appreciated!
 
well everyone else is going to tell you this so i figure i might as well be the first...

BACKUP IMPORTANT DATA!

wipe the drive, start over. this is the end, my only friend the end :p.
 
Hey
1) to clarify a misunderstanding, if the hard drive does not mount, but is disk utility capable, then what is the problem there.
2) i have had this problem too, but mine was a simpler problem in which the operating system went corrupt(according to the applecare reps etc, i have a dual 2.0 with a 160gb seagate and a 250gb wd both sata and both 7200 rpm, the rep had me try disk utility and it said it worked etc, but it really didnt, we reloaded and the same grey screen appeared, unfortunately, i lost All my data, but i keep backups of the important stuff(music, pictures, documents), corruption is the only major problem i have ever faced in OSX, hint never run apps while running software update.
2) if it was a surge, your data is probably wiped anyhow, which is bad news anyhow
Advice
My advice to you is 1) see if a friend has a sata computer and attach your hd to it and try to see if you can access the files(this means removing the drive from your mac), if you dont have a friend then do it the old fashioned way. Go to an Apple Store with Your Harddrive, pop open or ask to pop open a g5 tower(is your HD capable of being hotplugged(meaning you can plug it in and access it)) and attach your hd to the sata data and power cables, restart the machine and hopefully youll see your hd show up as a drive, if so, take all the relevant data and buy some blank dvd's and burn it onto them, apple stores are nice about letting apple customers(aka g5 owners) use their machines(note i am not saying g5 owners alone, just in this case schenario) and get the data.
2) if this doesnt work, data is gonzo, formatting is the only option if that is even possible, a clean wipe of your HD's might be the only way to salvage them, drastic but its life
3) for the commentary on why the bfdsfje%34 would someone buy a 36 gb wd drive, it is a WD Raptor 36gb running at 10000rpm which is a heck of a lot faster than aa 7200 rpm when working with video editing, thought the 36 gb size is more of a nuisance in the editing world, other than that there really is no reason to have a 10000rpm hd, my 250gb wd sata runs really fast, quiet and smoothly when handling video and i have no inclination to go out and buy either the 36 or 74 gb 10000rpm raptor drive because this drive is plenty fast
hope this helps

Matt



neonart said:
I was getting some weird crashes in Safari for some reason on my Dual 2.0, so I repaired permissions and ran Mac Janitor. No bad permissions and MacJanitor ran just fine.
I though well, I'll restart and maybe it'll work itself out.

Thats when things went horribly wrong. As the machine tried to boot up it would get stuck at the grey Apple screen and not go anywhere. I pushed the power button until it turned off and tried to zap the PRAM. Same thing. Not good. Booted from OSX.3 CD and tried disk repair- not capable of fixing it. TechTool 4. Tried, but no dice.

Now the drive does not even show up as mounted. My data drive also shows to have some damage. But it's readable and looks to have accepted the Disk utility repairs. (I'm thinking a power surge or something may have caused the problems.

Here are my system specs:
RevA Dual 2.0, 1 GB CL2.5 RAM, Raptor 36GB 10K RPM HD (the really screwed up one), WD 160GB 7200RPM HD (not so screwed up, still readable), USB PCI card, Powermate, Soundsticks, iSight, Radeon 9800 OEM 128MB, Formac 2010.

I need to at least access the drive so I can try to save my stuff. The data on that drive has YEARS of emails, contacts, etc. Some is on .Mac, but alot is not.

Your help and suggestions are very appreciated!
Click to expand...
 
Thanks guys! I'll try some of these suggestions. I think data may be hard to get since it does not even show up in FW target disk mode on my Powerbook. (The data drive shows up.)
I'll try TTP data recover, or save data feature. If I can at least get some of my data out, I'll be happy.
 
and it get's better...

After shutting the G5 down I disconnected the data drive in fear that any other forced shutdowns may hurt it. (This was the drive with less damage) Now the Data HD is not even being recognized as a readable volume.:eek: It now seems to be worse than my boot drive! I tried to use TTP4 to do data recovery on my powerbook using firewire disk mode and it kernel panic'd my book!
Duff-man suggested DiskWarrior. Any other suggestions on software that will help me at least save my files!? It's going to suck if I loose the data on my Data HD! All my MP3's and AAC's, all my photos, all my movies, all my downloads.... oh boy. What a wonderful week this has been... :(
 
neonart said:
This worked! AMAZING!

Can I use fsck on my data hard drive whick does not have a OSX in it?

Can I do it through the terminal?
Click to expand...
Duff-Man says....great news! Yeah, fsck can sometimes do little wonders too....hopefully your problem was just a one time thing. I would still recommend getting a copy of Diskwarrior though - it has resurrected disks where all else has failed - here is the latest article about a positive experience....and also get some sort of back up schedule going....oh yeah!
 
MORE PROBLEMS! AAARRRGH!

I'm back to square one, or two.
Boot drive was fixed with fsck. Data HD was still unmountable.
After actually running my OS, getting email, etc. I tried to fix the Data HD to no avail. I then decided to backup my Boot drive and it caused a kernil panic.

Now I'm back to no bootable, mountable drives.

And to make it worse Apple-S will not boot into single user mode! Jumps to grey apple screen- only to lock up. :mad: I can't even run fsck again! What the heck? Any thoughts on that?

I tried downloading Data Rescue demo. I ran it from my old G4 and my G5 in FW disk mode. Kernil Panic.

My next step is to hopefully figure a way to run fsck on the boot drive so I can "gently" save only the bare minimum from my boot drive if it decides to work again.
Then on monday a friend f mine is going to lend me Data Rescue. I'll install it in my then repaired, reformatted boot drive(hopes). Or maybe from my FW case. If it works I'll buy it. Hopefully it wont bum out too.

Any suggestions on why Apple-S won't go into single-user mode? Can I use fsck from another machine to fix this one? Can I use fsck to fix data only drives? Anyone have any experience with Data Rescue? Why is the sky blue?...

Sorry I'm bugging so much folks. Just gotta try it all before I hit the erase button...
 
neonart said:
Any suggestions on why Apple-S won't go into single-user mode? Can I use fsck from another machine to fix this one? Can I use fsck to fix data only drives? Anyone have any experience with Data Rescue? Why is the sky blue?...

Sorry I'm bugging so much folks. Just gotta try it all before I hit the erase button...
Click to expand...
It still has to boot the OS, without the GUI and a few other things, so if the OS and/or catalog is thrashed it probably won't boot.

Thus the check of the HW by booting off the CD/DVD.

Have you tried booting into Open Firmware? "printenv" to see what the boot-device is, "nvram -p" to zap pram, then "mac-boot" to reboot.
 
First TTP is not the best utility in the world, my experience with it has been bad, Try getting Norton System Works and run Norton Disk Doctor, if that does not work try booting off an external FW drive and use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy all the data off of your drive, so you can erase and start over. Make sure the copy that Carbon Copy makes mounts on your FW drive. IF that fails then maybe its time to get a replacement drive, if it has a lifetime warranty demand a new drive. Good luck.
 
If the data is REALLY important to you.. there are shops that might be able to recover the data for you. Apparently, they are capable of recovering data from "dead, deleted, formatted, fdisked, corrupted, virus infecter, water & fire damage, overwritten, passworded" and etc. (I just copied this off their advertizement). I have 2 dead drives so I'm planning to getting it done in the next 2 weeks or so. The only down side to this is.. it is quite expensive and is only worth it if the data is SUPER important to you. In Vancouver, Canada (where i live).. it costs around 500 dollars CND to get one drive fixed. :eek:
 
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