[Richard Clark]

We've had two G4s that have had to have their hard drives re-initialized:

G4/867 DP (Mirror) February 5, 2003
G4/1 GHZ DP (Mirror) March 13, 2003

My boss worked on the 867. I don't know all the details. But OS X was not working right. At the time it was running 10.2.3. The hard drive could not have the OS re-installed with the way it was acting so he had to initialize it. It's been running fine ever since.

The 1 GHZ was running in Mac OS 9. Here is a run down from my log:

03/13/2003 - Karen’s machine has not been working right. It had been reported to John LaRocca. Karen said that John instructed her to shut the machine down and restart. This morning the computer requested that Disk First Aid be run. John ran the Mac OS 9 version but was not able to solve the problem. He also tried to boot from Norton Utilities but the hard drive does not appear (this is common with this model). Machine would only flash disk and question mark. (could not boot from System Folder). John had Richard run the Disk Utility program (First Aid) from the OS X install CD. It found an invalid Extent Entry. This was repaired. Restarted machine and still unable to boot OS 9. Restarted and booted into OS Install CD. Checked disk again and it showed that it still had invalid Extent Entry. Was repaired a second time. Restarted and didn’t work. Booted from Install Disk and tried to install OS X but hard drive did not come up and was unable to install. Booted from Apple Hardware Test CD and ran tests. All tests passed. Booted OS X CD and was still unable to install. Hard Drive would not appear. Also could not mount disk with Disk Utility. Tried to boot from Software Restore CD but would not boot. Booted from Commercial OS X 10.2 Install CD but still couldn’t see HD. Zapped PRAM, did not help. Booted from OS X Install CD, still showed invalid Extent Entry. Shut machine down, hit cuda switch, did not help. Booted from OS X Install CD, used Disk Utility (erase) and initialized HD with HFS+. Was then able to Install Mac OS X 10.2. Then installed Mac OS 10.2.4 and Security Update.

Ok, so my question is this - When the hard drive is not showing up and it can't be mounted what alternatives are there?

Should I have gone into the terminal from the X boot CD and tried something?

The Norton Utilities 7 boot CD will boot with these machines but will not show or allow work on the hard drive. This is frustrating. Should a custom CD be made that can be bootable to run and repair Norton?

Any tips or tricks would be appreciated! Thanks in advance!

[Thor]

Diskwarrior is your friend.

I've have used it to resurrect drives that did not show up with other tools.

I think Norton 3.5 was the last version that I trusted.

[rcpmac]

Diskwarrior is good but if you run norton first disk warrior likely will not work.

[Richard Clark]

Well, since the posting on this topic I have looked into creating a rescue CD that will boot on the dual mirrors. And I've succeeded!



I took the system folder from a dual mirror and put it on a disk image. Used the preferences that were from the Norton CD and cut out a lot of extenstions that weren't needed. Then sent the image to Toast. The System Folder smily face came up in Toast so that was a good sign. Burned it, tested it, took a few more extensions out, tweaked it and Viola! Got a solution now if those new machines go down instead of having to initialized the HD.

I've been running it on a good number of the dual mirror machines and it's working good. There are major problems coming up with the catalog b-tree and other major items. Part of it I believe is due to OS X. And I haven't been defragmenting the HD since most of these machines are running in X. Booting back into X has been fine and the machines are running good.

I know that there are a number threads out there about creating CDs. And I know that this only runs NUM 6 but it helps and it's a start. At least I have a tool for fixing the machine before having to get extreme which we've done twice in the past month.

[JB72]

The good news is that DiskWarrior 3 will be out within a two or three weeks. Hopefully that will help. I'm hoping it will cure a "missing thread id" problem that's been bothering me. I believe OS 9 is creepy in a way like if you saw your long dead grandma walking around town. I don't let it near my systems without holy water and a member of the clergy at hand.