Hey Everybody,

Really calling on the helpful MacTalk Melbourne Community here to help me revive my Powerbook G4 to it's former glory...

I've just moved from Brisbane to Melbourne and unfortunately, know nobody at all, let alone anybody with a Mac...

My Powerbook is on the verge of death... OSX won't boot (freezes on the Checking Internet Services screen) and I have a corrupted Hard Drive which Disk Utility is not able to repair... Secondly, my 60GB hard drive is soo full that I can't even do an archive and install...

I recently bought an external firewire drive to move everything onto, however, due to not being able to boot my system I haven't been able to do this...

I don't want to do a full reformat and reinstall as I haven't been able to backup my music library or photo library.. Not soo worried about the music, but definately the photos...

I believe I have two options.

1. Find another mac user who would be willing to help me out, put the PB in Target Disk Mode and copy everything to the external HDD then reformat and reinstall on the internal.

2. Install OSX onto the Firewire drive, boot from that, copy everything over from my internal drive, reformat, reinstall.

My preference is for the first option and I guess I'm asking if anybody is willing to assist me? If it's any help I live in Fitzroy North...

Alternatively, does anybody else have any suggestions...

I've really brought this problem up on myself, however, I hope somebody is able to assist...

*Fingers Crossed*

Cheers!

I'd do option 2 straight away. It's much more simpler than you might think.

Disko is right

Have the FireWire drive plugged in when you boot from the CD - install OS X, and then set the boot volume as the external drive.

Your internal drive will mount as a FW drive on your desktop.

Take out the "and" from the above quote, and thats the problem right there.
You were in sunny Qld and moved to the Arctic!

If you still need some help, let me know, we can meet up and I'll give you a hand

Off topic, but each time I go down to Melbourne i notice that people think Brisbane is the same as the Whitsundays - all palm trees and daiquiris. Old Melbourne town stacks up pretty well i reckon.

good luck with the problem schmick. I vote for No.2 also, No.1 will work just fine though if you've got someone handy.

Hey peoples,

OK, I went for Option 2 and installed OSX onto my external firewire drive, however, for some reason my Powerbook still won't boot... =(

I changed the boot disk to point to the External HD and when it boots, I get the little Mac Face Folder with a Question Mark... Seems as though the External Drive isn't mounting at startup perhaps?

My enclosure was the Coolermaster X-Craft Combo... I've got a 320GB Seagate HDD and I"ve set the jumpers to "Cable Select", although I did also try "Master" to no avail...

Any ideas?

Decryption, I've actually sent you a PM... Currently sitting in an inet cafe on Brunswick St as this is my only means of inet access at the moment, without venturing into work...