OK it's been a while since I've had to do any troubleshooting so might be quicker to ask the Q.

Was doing some work on the G4 digital audio model in photoshop
took ages to save a file. Then went to Dreamweaver and opened a index.html to work on
and got the spinning beach ball of death.

Ended up pressing the reset button at the front of the mac and now when it boots
it just gets stuck on the grey screen with apple logo and the spinning wheel!

Have tried resetting pram got the the two chimes now I have just a larger grey screen/logo/spinning wheel!

Help! what can I do now as I need to get on for work in the morning urgently!
Can't remember what the process is to try and get it going as it's been soooo long
since I've
done any of the procedures.

anyone....
cheers

OK pull what little hair I have left out at the moment!

Ran techtool deluxe and it came up with Volume Structure Failure!
Did the Volume Structure Repair but it came up with a list of bits in red and
it said to back up otherwise I may lose data so I didn't proceed.

Booted up from OSX tiger disk and went to disk utility.
Guess what....
HD is listed in red with the following in the screen.
"This drive has reported a fatal hardware error to Disk Utility.
If the drive has not failed completely, back up as much data as you can
and then replace it with a working drive."

S>M>A>R>T> Status: Failing (in red!)

AAAAAARRRRGGHHH!!!!

what the hell can I do now!



I did a backup about a week ago of all my graphics jobs but have other work
that I REALLY need to get off the HD.

If I do a replace is there any chance I can get back to my HD to try and recover my work
or am I more likely to lose stuff forever?

I have an external LaCie firewire drive.
An iBook G3 that has one firewire port.

Can I hook up all 3 to get my stuff off the G4 in target disk mode?

really need some advice here!

just tried firewire mode with the iBook but no HD icon appears on the iBooks desktop.

Generally, at this point, if you have to ask what to do, you shouldn't be doing anything at all. Shut the computer down and leave it off until you can take it into a service center. The more you use your computer at this stage, the less chance there is of doing a software recovery of files.

That being said, if you decide to attempt the data recovery yourself, the procedure would be to connect an external drive, preferably with Data Rescue II or DiskWarrior 4.1 installed along with a bootable OS X install, run either of those utilities over your bad HD and recover as much as possible. Alternatively, with an external drive connected with no OS on it, you can boot from the Data Rescue or DiskWarrior CDs (provided you have the correct versions for you Mac.)

Only YOU know the value of your data, so base your decision how to proceed on that. Keep in mind that data recovery centers can charge anywhere from $200-$1500 depending on whether they do a software recovery or actually need to dismantle your HD and perform some voodoo on it.

Good luck,

Dave

Thanks for that Dave.

Well I'm back after only 4 no make that 3 hours sleep!
After no joy with the firewire option, I had a look inside the G4 to find that the ribbon
connecting the HD to the MBoard had a 2mm section missing a neat little hole,
just one of the wires on the ribbon was gone.
Don't know when or how but I thought straight away that was the answer.
Searched and found a replacement ribbon, connected it up but still no joy and now
instead of just hanging on the grey screen it will switch itself off after 40-60seconds.

Don't have those disks that Dave mentioned either.

Anyone in Perth have any places to recommend that don't charge a bundle
or know anyone that would be kind enough to try and help me out.

In a real pickle here!

I'm just wondering , depending on which wire it was , whether the HD has been damaged by a short or something. I actually doubt this in one way because I assume that the IDE cable is for data transmission only and no power which comes from the separate molex connector instead.
Are you sure that the second replacement cable is OK ? Can you try it with another machine or another HD ? And aren't some IDE cables for master and some only for slave configurations too.
I'm sure if you had a good cable then your troubles would be over.

Stewie

just made a call to apple centre
the cable is normal, comes with it's own little section missing

Ahhh, then your HD is either dead or dying. FileSalvage or DataRescue for Tiger are probably your best options to recover as much as possible .

Stewie

which would be better, diskwarrior4.1 or FileSalvage or DataRescue?

With a dying HD, there is a ONE TIME ONLY method that might recover it. You put the HD in the freezer overnight then pull all the data off it.

Just a note, no service centre will be able to help you if the drive has physically died. In that case, it's off to a HD recovery company, where you're up for anything from $1k to $10k.

Yes , I've heard of the old HD in the freezer trick too with mixed results and it may be your only option. Other than that , DW I think is good for a drive that is physically OK but has got a borked volume structure etc whereas FS or DR can operate on a HD that has got both hardware and software problems depending of course on how bad the situation is.
I have only used FS which did the job for me a while back. I have not used DR but I understand that it operates in much the same way.
Good Luck !

Stewie

Hi Cactus,

I have found the AppleWorx store in Joondalup to always be extremely helpful and efficient. I think it's nearish to you too, isn't it?

If you need discwarrior, I'm pretty sure I have a DiscWarrior 4.(something) CD you can use.

And if it helps at all, there's a G4 400Mhz (with no HD, I think?) in the shed you're welcome to borrow too.

Re: the freezer method : Worked OK for me once, until the drive warmed up, which was only after a minute or so..

Good luck

Jeremy PM sent mate

OK just putting in an old working HD with OS9 on it to see if it could be logic board
just in case
and when I unpluged the power plug from the problem HD
3 friggin pins come out of the drive with the plug!!!!

I think I'll just go and buy a new 500gb WD HD and redo the work from the last couple of weeks!

Have rang around, now can someone confirm that it's a
PATA IDE drive that I need to get. WD 500gb for $139 is not bad.

Yeah, it's PATA IDE..

Someone else will have a bitch and rave to you about WD vs. Seagate vs. Samsung etc etc etc