New internal Drive on G5 NOT showing up--HELP!

[Bru-Hed]

Help! Pardon my verbosity but I'd rather over-explain than under-:

G5 1.8 single (OS 10.3.9) drive is slowly dying. (Literally takes half an hour to boot.) Ran Disk Warrior, reslut was internal malfunction--solution: replace drive.

Before I trash it, I want to copy all data/software. Just installed a Seagate 7200 500gb (and some extra memory) in lower bay. Problem: when I boot from the OSX CD, the second drive is there, but no way to transfer old drive to new one. It does not show up on my desktop, nor does Disk Warrior recognize it! DW rebuilt the damaged directory from the original drive but could not replace it due to the damage. It shows me the preview/details of the rebuilt directory and offers the advice, "It is highly recommended that you backup all of your data from the preview disk", BUT offers no way to transfer/copy it to the new drive (that I can find, anyway).

It's frustrating because everything, files/folders, etc. is still on my desktop, EXCEPT the new drive. I also have a backup Firewire EZQ drive with most of my data, which does show up on both desktop and DW. However, I cannot boot from it. All I want to do is copy everything from either my original (bad) drive or the EZQ to the new drive and be able to boot from the new one, using it as a replacement for the old original.

Any ideas?

FYI: I'm a Luddite artist-type so if anyone can dumb it down for a "dummy", I would be eternally grateful. Thanks very much for any help!

Best,
Mike

 

[spork183]

did you format the new drive using disk utility? If the old drive is stable enough to run once booted, use superduper (search for it at versiontracker.com) to clone the old to the new. You could also install your operating system on your firewire drive and boot off of that, then do the cloning. most firewire drives support booting if you have an operating system installed.

 

[Bru-Hed]

Thank you very much for the quick response! I can't seem to format it from Disk Utility as the buttons to do so were grayed out when I tried it yesterday (tho I can try it again). I cloned the old drive onto my EZQ but I was later told that I did it incorrectly (drag and drop) so permissions were not correct and that's why I'm unable to boot from it.

Can't download anything with the old drive as it literally takes about 20 to 30 minutes for each command to execute. (I'm accessing this forum from my wife's old Windows laptop.)

Luckily, Disk Warrior is now allowing me to copy the rebuilt directory of the original drive onto the EZQ, so I'm going to try copying the System folder and seeing if that will enable me to boot from the EZQ.

Thanks again and if you or anyone else has any other ideas, info or shortcuts (or similar experiences) I'd love to hear them as it's always helpful to understand more of this stuff.

--Mike

 

[Bru-Hed]

This is too bizarre!

Okay, how's this for a wrinkle...The new internal drive ONLY shows up when I launch Disk Utility. It does not show up when using the Installer (so I can't add OSx to it) and the EZQ external backup does NOT show up in Startup Disk (so I can't choose it as my startup disk, even tho it has the exact same System folder from my original internal drive).

Man is this frustrating...I had no idea that installing the new internal drive would be so easy but getting it to work with the software would be such a drawn-out mystery and hassle...I've spent two days on it now.

Luckily, the EZQ does show up on the Installer for some reason, so I am now attempting to instal OSX on that and then, just maybe, I can (finally) boot up from it.

Anyone have any idea why only some of these drives only show up on some programs like this?

Thanks again,
Mike