[mikejaz]

System: G4/733/512 meg/OS9.2.2

Problem: well, it happened while I was at a client's place, and my wife was trying to fax something...so I can't say exactly what happened. But the result is this:

I have two hard drives on the Apple-supplied ATA bus; a 40-gig Western Digital, which is my boot volume, and the original 60-gig Maxtor which came with the unit, and which is partitioned into 3 parts.

"Something happened, and the computer crashed", according to my wife, and the result is that the 60-gig no longer shows up on the desktop.

After checking it out with Disk First Aid (which insists that the missing volume isn't initialized), and Disk Warrior (which does nothing), I began to feel that what happened is that the catalog must be damaged. However, when checking it out with Norton Disk Doctor (v.6.0), Norton will search the bus and find the 3 missing volumes. Upon examining each of them, however, it is unable to load the disk driver (this according to the error message Norton gives me), and suggests I reload the driver.

I'm a little confused. Norton can find the volumes; they show up with their correct names; but it can't mount them. However, the fact that it can find the volumes at all is a good sign, no, and could mean that all is not lost?

How should I proceed? I could just go ahead and re-initialize, as most of the stuff on these three partitions was just backup; but there is a compression project on one of them that I'd really rather not start over. Any suggestions? I seem to remember that FWB Toolkit had a "mount" command; any other recovery software which might help me?

Mike Janowski
Jaz & company electronic post
"more bytes for less bite"

[mikejaz]

Hmmm, not much action here...however, here's the solution, just in case you run into the same...


As you may recall, I tried to use Norton (sort of a court of last resort, after Disk Warrior, DFA and TechTool...), and it could indeed see the damaged partitions; but not mount them. I was told by a tech from Disk Warrior:

"If the driver is corrupted Norton Utilities may still see the disk
because it communicates with the disk directly where as other disk
utilities, including Apple Disk First Aid, communicate with disks through
the driver."

To compound my problems, my computer was supplied with an OS 9.1 disk; of course, I'm using 9.2.2 now, and so I could not attempt an OS reload to fix the driver on the "missing" drive.

But fear not, all is well. I brought the drive into a client's, and let their Mac wizard take a crack at it. He hosed it up into his G4/867, running Jaguar, and voila, it mounted. Why? Well, the drive in question contained the partition I used to boot OS 10 from, so I guess the OS10 drivers weren't damaged. Anyway, we backed up files from the drive I wanted to keep, and re-initialized. All is well now.

A couple of pointers the tech gave me about how I had the drive set up:

-two of the three partitions on the formerly damaged drive were named "(partname).bak". I was told that many apps, etc., see the .bak extension as a file name, and thus, it's not good to name a whole drive partition in that manner.

-the OS10 partition was not installed on the first 8 gig of the drive. Apparently, this is something peculiar to OS10.

-finally, I think that what caused the initial problems was that I had inadvertently backed up some applications, including my fax software (FaxStf 6) to the backup partition. Thus, when my wife attempted to fax her document, I bet the app was running off the backup, not the app in the applications folder (perhaps in this case this was a good thing!). When she had the crash, then, the backup drive got screwed.

Anyway, all is well now...thanks for your concern.