Hi people
Helping a friend get back to work with her iMac just coming back from repair, I booted off the external backup (made with SuperDuper before the repair).
I proceed to copy everything back to the internal drive, using SuperDuper. Just like I've always done for the past 3 years without a problem.
The copy process is going on fine, but the computer hangs, spinning beachball and all.
Easy peasy I say, just turn the iMac off and do it again. It was just a copy routine.
But the iMac doesn't boot. The internal drive isn't bootable, of course, since the backup didn't go all the way as it should.
What's more alarming is that the external drive, still plugged like when we first booted up off it, doesn't seem to work either.
I boot off the OSX CD and fire up the disk utility, to try and zap the unfinished partition on the internal drive, to see if it helps, if that's the problem.
But I stop right away, after noticing that the external drive, previously split in 2 partitions of 150GB each, now only shows ONE 53GB partiton !!!
That's when I turned everything off, waiting until I find the solution to avoid destroying the data that is probably still there, just the FAT is messed up.
Does Disk Warrior work at drive level ? I see you can choose a partition to work onto, but what if that partition is incorrect (and another is missing) ?
Is there another utility that can find back the partitions ?
Also, I'm worried that Spotlight might try to index the partition when I plug the drive, and I definitely don't want anything to be written onto that drive... I've found that you can only disable indexing by dragging its icon in the privacy pane, or entering the drive name... I'd rather disable Spotlight temporarily while I attempt a recovery and then turn it back on (I love it and couldn't do without it).
Thanks for your help
Helping a friend get back to work with her iMac just coming back from repair, I booted off the external backup (made with SuperDuper before the repair).
I proceed to copy everything back to the internal drive, using SuperDuper. Just like I've always done for the past 3 years without a problem.
The copy process is going on fine, but the computer hangs, spinning beachball and all.
Easy peasy I say, just turn the iMac off and do it again. It was just a copy routine.
But the iMac doesn't boot. The internal drive isn't bootable, of course, since the backup didn't go all the way as it should.
What's more alarming is that the external drive, still plugged like when we first booted up off it, doesn't seem to work either.
I boot off the OSX CD and fire up the disk utility, to try and zap the unfinished partition on the internal drive, to see if it helps, if that's the problem.
But I stop right away, after noticing that the external drive, previously split in 2 partitions of 150GB each, now only shows ONE 53GB partiton !!!
That's when I turned everything off, waiting until I find the solution to avoid destroying the data that is probably still there, just the FAT is messed up.
Does Disk Warrior work at drive level ? I see you can choose a partition to work onto, but what if that partition is incorrect (and another is missing) ?
Is there another utility that can find back the partitions ?
Also, I'm worried that Spotlight might try to index the partition when I plug the drive, and I definitely don't want anything to be written onto that drive... I've found that you can only disable indexing by dragging its icon in the privacy pane, or entering the drive name... I'd rather disable Spotlight temporarily while I attempt a recovery and then turn it back on (I love it and couldn't do without it).
Thanks for your help