i Was copying folders around leaving everything clean & I decided to restart to do all the next cleaning stuff (Zapping PRAM and so on) so when I restarted the desktop freezed (maybe when doing the TCP/IP log off) so I had to manually restart soooooo... suddenly I get the Folder and Question mark icon on the boot instead of the happy face.

So I had to boot with the restore CD ... next it tells me my HD is not readable.. what the hell !!!! Obviously I didnt have any HD rescue software on CD so I couldnt do nothing more than reformat the hard drive.. I lost all my cool configs and Icon customization around all my folders and my last downloads of course..

that is not cool.

[MacNN Staff]

Transferring to the Mac OS forum.

[Don Foy]

This is probably not a good time to tell you this, but you do have disk utilities on your restore disk. Look in the utilities folder. Disk First Aid is there. It may or may not have helped you in this situation, but it is free and it is worth a try.

I also recommend to everyone that they keep a bootable CD of TechTool Pro 3 or Norton Utilities around in case of disaster. It's not a matter of if a hard drive will have a problem, it's a matter of when.

[reader50]

The partition table could have been damaged, but it is somewhat more likely that the driver partition got hosed instead.

Should this happen again, try Disk First Aid and other repair utilities like Don Foy said. If that does not do it, try Drive Setup. Select your HD, and choose "Update Drivers" from the menu. That will install a clean driver copy into the driver partition.

Assuming that works, run a disk repair utility afterwards. Just to make sure.

If nothing worked, you can still get most or even all of it back if you have an undelete utility. Format the drive again exactly as before (partition sizes/orders exactly the same). Look into Drive Setup's options and make sure Low Level Format and Zero All Data are OFF. If either is on, all your data will be gone forever.

Once the format is finished do nothing to the apparently empty partition(s). Run the undelete utility, it should be able to get nearly everything back.

well , nothing on the restore cd worked, as you said before Don, I would have needed a Techtool CD or Norton. I will have it for next time though

at least Ive learned something, I just hope this doesnt happen too often. Im even thinking of setting up a cheap PC with Linux to act as a Fileserver. Im soo paranoid , I dont wanna lose anything.

Take care

Dan

Undelete ???

cool , I didnt know it worked after formatting... know i know for next time ... thanks for the cool tip !

Dan