Hi folks.
Up until last week, I was doing a considerable amount of travelling, and happily lugging my iBook around with me.
Within the last several weeks, it began to have trouble booting into the OS. I used the "boot and repair" CD to launch the disk utility to at least figure out what was going on... not good. The two partitions are evident but the damage can't be repaired.
My next best bet was to move the data onto another drive, and then wipe and reinstall, but that can't be accomplished using the boot CD, and the BSD shell doesn't see the external drives. I considered a commercial data recovery company, but the $500 price tag puts me off a bit.
So here's the question: is there anywhere in Ottawa that I can go to get the data (photos, music, text files) dumped onto a CD/external drive so that I can then wipe the hard drive and reinstall the OS that won't cost me my first-born?
As an alternative, is there any way to rescue the hard drive, or should I simply take it in and have it replaced?
This is the first time I've ever seen this happen with a Mac since I began working with them in '89... (don't I sound like Abe Simpson?)
Virousselib.
Try connecting your 'book to another Mac via the firewire ports. Start up your "dead" mac with the "t" key down, hold it down until you see a giant firewire icon pong-ing around your 'books' screen. Now start up the "good" mac, and with any luck you your 'book will show up as an icon on the other Mac's desktop. You may be able to recover some files that way - if not you can try a powerful recovery tool like Data Rescue from ProSoft Engineering to salvage files - thats one tool most techs have. If you're not comfortable, then by all means bring it to an Apple service specialist. Beyond that, it gets very, very, expensive. Good luck, hope this helps,
Dan
Hi there.
Well, I finally had some time to tinker. After much puttering around, there was nothing for it but to completely erase and reinstall OSX 10.3.9.
Fortunately, after lots of system updates after the fact, the two partitions are still two partitions, and the data from the one partition doesn't seem to have been affected by the reinstallation of the OS on the other. Phew.
Unfortunately, I realize that while I'd thought I was saving my iPhotos to my data partition, they were really being saved to the OS partition.
Here's the next question: is there any way to retrieve photo data from the OS partition if it's been overwritten by a new installation (I suspect the answer is "No", but thought I'd ask anyway...)
Thanks,
virousselib.
No. Yes. Maybe. Data Rescue can recover all those iPhotos that haven't been overwritten by the OS. Did the firewire option not help? Too late now, but I have recovered many "dead" drives in that manner. Call around and see if any of the Apple shops offer that recovery service... I don't know of any that do except our own. Like I said, after that, it gets VERY expensive.
You can relocate your iPhoto Library from its default - in iTunes, select Preferences->Advanced->General->Change iTunes default location.
You can see external drives in "BSD" (Darwin, actually), navigate into the Volumes folder on your boot drive et voila - your externals are mounted to this directory. Like so:
G4-500:~ dmillar$ cd /volumes
G4-500:/volumes dmillar$ ls
Mad Macs Data MadMaX RoadWarrior
Mad Macs Data 1 MadMaX2 RoadWarrior 1
MadMaX is my boot drive, the others are ALL externals. "cd" to any disks volume name and you're there... and yes, I do most of my everyday work on a desktop G4-500 dualie and it's still way faster than my 2.2GHz dualie PC running XP - go figure...
Happy Mac'ing
Dan
Hi there.
Unfortunately I don't know anyone else with a Mac and/or Firewire in order to have tried out the suggestion. I did try working through the BSD shell, however the hard drives, USB drives and externally linked PC did not appear as your example - i.e. we could find nowhere to copy data to. I think the drive is just seriously hosed...
Update: after all the wiping and installing from yesterday, I've saved a lot of files off the iBook in order to archive them elsewhere. The iBook has had to restart several times this morning simply in order to find its startup disk. I believe I'll need to get it looked at professionally. Other than looking for "Apple Authorized", are there any other caveats prior to my settling on a service shop?
TIA,
virousselib