[Launch210]

Due to recent stormy weather, I am assuming I have experienced a power surge. I have only switched from the PC world very recently and require advice here.

My G5 (which IS plugged into a surge protector) was turned on after when the storm would have taken place, and the power activated fine. I made it to the screen where the shapes sort of circulate around the apple symbol, pre-official-startup. The computer never makes it beyond this point... it simply continues to circulate. After several minutes and as a result of what I assume is overheating, the fans in the computer speed up to jet-engine proportions but no progress is made in the startup. I end up turning the computer off out of mercy and fear of nuclear meltdown.

I spoke to an Apple-saavy friend about this, who walked me through convincing the Superdrive to open by holding down the mouse button at turn-on (The eject key proved ineffective) and getting the startup DVD to load.

The DVD did eventually load and walked me through the installation of OS X, up until the point where you select an installation drive. No drives appeared in the menu. I selected the disk utility under the file menu at this point, where my hard drive and volume showed up. However, when volume was selected, it said that it was not mounted. I performed the detect and repair disc functions, to no avail. I get a red-colored prompt informing me of an invalid key sequence or something to that effect.

From here I have no idea what to do. Presumably the probably power surge had adverse effects on the functionality of my hard drive, but what do I do about this? Should I call Apple and arrange to have it sent back? Since the computer is new I am still under warranty, but is this the best solution?

Any ideas would be welcome.

Launch210@aol.com

[Landos Mustache]

When you statup from the CD can you reformat the hard drive? Yes you will lose the data on it but the drive might be ok after that.

[xylon]

Have you tried fsck? I had some problems on one of my machines at work (same as you, hard drive not mounting), so I booted into single user mode fsck'd the drive and then mounted it with read write privileges. After that, the drive mounted and the computer has been fine since. Maybe I was just lucky.

Anyways, here's an article on the Apple site about how to boot into single user mode.

To run fsck, you simple type fsck -y (there is a space between the k and the -) at the prompt and hit enter.

Most of the lines you'll see on the screen will have no relevance to you. There are two lines, however, that appear towards the end of the scrolling the will tell you to run fsck before you mount the drive. These lines will tell you basically exactly what you need to type.

After that, you can type "reboot" as the article suggests or "logout" to boot into the aqua interface.

Hope that helps and good luck!

[Arkham_c]

Since the machine is under warranty the easiest thing might be to just send it to Apple.

If it were out of warranty, and you did NOT need the data, I'd suggest reformatting.

If it were out of warranty and you DID need the data, I'd suggest getting DiskWarrior and using it.

[Cadaver]

Even if still under warranty (which any G5 would be), I'd try Disk Warrior. You'll have to make sure that any copy of Disk Warrior you get is bootable on a G5. Otherwise, you could (if you have access to one) boot off a FireWire drive or another computer connected via Target Disk Mode and run Disk Warrior that way.

[Landos Mustache]

Originally posted by Arkham_c:
Since the machine is under warranty the easiest thing might be to just send it to Apple.

If it were out of warranty, and you did NOT need the data, I'd suggest reformatting.

If it were out of warranty and you DID need the data, I'd suggest getting DiskWarrior and using it.

Apple will not try to recover any data. If anything they will reformat it right away, if that doesn't work they just put in a new one.