Mac boots up in Darwin mode

[penerod]

Hi all,

Before I carry my Mac all the way into the city on the train to be repaired, can anyone help me?

What happened is my computer (PowerMac 6.3, PowerPC G4, 1.25GHz, 256mb,80GB) was running slowly, the beach ball kept spinning, nothing would even force quit, and I resorted to switching it off at the wall (stupid I know, maybe this is the reason the following happened)
So now it starts up with a black screen with......

Darwin/BSD (my name-.......)
Log in

After reading for hours on these and other forums I have tried..... logging in with my user name and password, starting up holding down the option key, and basically typing in a whole lot of commands which I don't understand.
After typing some of these commands, this is some of the things it said.....

Volume Bit Map needs minor repair

Invalid Volume free block count (it should be 13712373 instead of 13702701)

Cannot repair volume when it is mounted with write access

The Volume Hard Disk could not be repaired

Can anyone give an indication of what has happened? Are these signs of death and loss of 80gb of unbacked-up data?

Also, I had an idea of using a firewire cable between it and my iBook G4, and starting up in Target Disk Mode, maybe the hard drive would appear on the laptop and I would be able to retrieve my files? I would only attempt this if there was 0% chance of damaging my laptop, in case it was a virus or something, would it be possible to do damage to the laptop?

Any help much appreciated

 

[vandozza]

can you boot from your OSX DVD?

if so you could then run disk utility to try and repair the disk.

 

[penerod]

No, I can't open the disc drive unfortunately. Actually I don't even have the OSX DVD because my computer was given to me. I am pretty Mac illiterate anyway, but I'm trying to learn, to avoid paying an engineer a huge amount of money to repair something which I could have done myself with online help and perseverance.
Do you think my Target Disk Mode idea may work?

 

[vandozza]

"Cannot repair volume when it is mounted with write access" is telling you that you need to boot from an alternate drive before you can repair this volume.

Often the OSX install DVD is easiest.

But your target disc mode idea will also work. Boot the system off the external drive, and then you should be able to use disk utility to repair the internal drive.

I doubt that you will do any harm, but of course I can't promise you so.

 

[penerod]

Thanks for your reply, OK I will try the Target Disc Mode idea, I have no idea about Disc Utility but I do remember seeing it when I was trying to learn about my Mac. I'm guessing it will be all self-explanatory once I arrive there.
Thanks again

 

[vandozza]

once you boot up in target disk mode, open disk utility (applications/utilities directory)

select the drive you want to repair on the left pane, under the "first aid" tab, there should be an option, "repair disk" on the bottom right. (you could run verify disk first if you would like, and then repair, but it's probably not required.)