[schuster]

Hi all, I have a beige G3 and a hard disk that's having "issues". Is there a way to boot the mac w/o mounting the hard disk? Is it something that can be done in open firmware? Thanks in advance.

Dan

[ancd]

Hi: Boot from your original system CD and you won't be on the hard disk. Just put the CD in and restart while holding down the "C" key. Keep holding until you see the blue desktop covered with images of CDs. When it finishes loading, you can use the disk tools to analyze... disk first aid etc to check the Hard drive and possibly repair.

[schuster]

Booting from the CD doesn't work. Whenever the hard disk tried to mount, it was crashing the machine. Fortunately, I've made some progress today. The key combo I was looking for was apple-option-shift-delete. I've managed to recover some files. I'll get the rest of them tomorrow.

Dan

[tooki]

When booting off the CD, did the hard drive make the machine *freeze*, or did it just make clicking noises indefinitely?

If it is the latter, the OS *will* eventually give up trying to mount the disk and declare it damaged. After that you can use Disk First Aid or another utility to fix the problem. Note that the same long delay will occur again when the utility attempts to access the drive, but it too will give up trying to mount it, and will just read it itself, after which repair/recovery will start.

tooki

I have an iBook SE 366 with a similar problem but apl-opt-shft-del did not seem to prevent the hd from trying to mount or whatever was casuing cd boot to freeze as finder started loading, any suggestions?

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-- benhei