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Oh Please God Help Me!!!

R

Roughknight

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 14, 2006
4
0
Please, if you have any decency in you, HELP ME!! I'm like, 14, and I have a Mac G4 PowerPC. Now, I'm pretty good with Macs, and computers overall, but when I went to sleep early one night, yesterday night to be more precise, I awoke at around 3 in the morning to find my Macintosh computers screensaver going, and it phases in and out of random pictures on my hard drive. I went to go just randomly click the screen, just to maybe check to see if any of my insomniatic friends might still be online, but something had happened, the screensaver wasn't turning off, and the usual "enter password" box didn't appear. I was like, WTF!!?!?, and unplugged the computer after about 10 more clicks of my mouse, I plugged it back in, and my Mac was making this weird clicking noise, that never usually happened, and the start up noise was making a much higher pitch and was wasn't settling down as usual, and my moniter takes about 1 minute to start up, so, when it pulled up, I was expecting the usual Account and password thing that comes up to let me log in, but there was a gray screen, and a gray folder that repeatedly went from a Question Mark (?) to the Finder Icon....

I found this strange, and my uncle, who has helped me with this Mac for three years now, is in Long Island, shooting a CD with his band. Since I can't refer to him for this, please help me! I have a ton of assignments due in like, a week, and I really need my computer! I'm begging you, help me! Tell me any bit of information you know on something like this!??! Is my hard disk fried???!? Is the hard drive deleted? Did a worm or something come a delete everything?? I was thinking about using the G3 Apple reboot CD, but I really don't like how it works, and would rather try and find someplace where I could possibly buy a G4 reboot CD. If that's even how it will work! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HELP ME!!! I REALLY DON'T WANT TO SPEND ANOTHER 3,000 DOLLARS ON A GOD DAMN COMPUTER!
 
The hard drive... it is toast.

Try booting from your install CD's and run disk utility from there to see if you can repair the drive. If that works, back up your stuff and buy a new hard drive.

If that doesn't... you have backups right?
 
I don't know if God regulars these forums or not.

But anyway, your hard drive is damaged. You certainly don't need to buy a new computer, and it can probably be salvaged. Find someone with an external enclosure, throw it in, and connect it to a mac that's working properly. Get yourself a new hard drive, copy contents of old drive to new drive... insert new drive into mac, and you're good to go.

Unless of course, you can't get the HD to show up at all when in the enclosure. Then you're up a creek. Of course, you can still throw in a new HD, but you're out any data you had saved on the old one.
 
mkaake said:
I don't know if God regulars these forums or not.

But anyway, your hard drive is damaged. You certainly don't need to buy a new computer, and it can probably be salvaged. Find someone with an external enclosure, throw it in, and connect it to a mac that's working properly. Get yourself a new hard drive, copy contents of old drive to new drive... insert new drive into mac, and you're good to go.

Unless of course, you can't get the HD to show up at all when in the enclosure. Then you're up a creek. Of course, you can still throw in a new HD, but you're out any data you had saved on the old one.
Click to expand...
There are programs and services that can recover data, even from severely damaged HDs.
 
MacinDoc said:
There are programs and services that can recover data, even from severely damaged HDs.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure a 14 year old won't be able to afford those services (as well as many people here).

You don't need to spend $3,000 on a new machine, probably $100 for a new Hard drive. The clicking is a key sign that your Hard Drive is dead and therefore your data is gone. Sorry kid.
 
OEM drives are especially cheap. Talk to your uncle and have him talk to your parents to get the "OK" if necessary.

Data recovery is more expensive but possible [not all the time].
 
the 160 gig, 7200 rpm, 8mb cache HD I've got in my eMac right now cost $40 after rebates, about 5 months ago...
 
Interesting

mmmmmmmm....sounds very similar to another person on another site far, far away that said his uncle gave him the mac - his uncle was away - and he could not get past the login window at startup because his uncle had the password and he did not want to interrupt him!!!
 
....

Phew, thanks guys... I guess it's better to have a dead hard drive then to have a dead computer. I'll get my uncle to see if he can find a new hard drive for me, and thanks again, that really helped alot.
 
earthling0 said:
mmmmmmmm....sounds very similar to another person on another site far, far away that said his uncle gave him the mac - his uncle was away - and he could not get past the login window at startup because his uncle had the password and he did not want to interrupt him!!!
Click to expand...

Now that's an easier problem to fix, honestly. And at least you don't loose any data in the process...

My father purchased an iBook on ebay, from a non-computer-literate person who forgot to send along the admin password (it was legit, and when he finally got back in contact with her a few weeks later, she gave it to him), so I had to find out how to get him admin rights...

Needless to say, by the time I had it figured out, and walked him through the process, we both were even more firm believers in the saying that there's no such thing as a secure machine, if you allow physical access to it.

Wowser.
 
Will the real God, please stand up.
 

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