[jhsos]

Would be really greatfull for any advice /help:

Have a G4 running Mac OS 9. Crashed and rebooted to get flashing question mark over the finder folder. Tried zapping pram but did not fix it. Put Norton disk doctor in the machine rebooted and did a scan & fix -restarted. This time there was no chime on start up, flashing question mark alternating with afloppy disk icon appeared, then after a few second the smiling mac icon displayed - but the computor just seemes to stall in that state. It wont eject the nortons disk now either so i don't know how i'd get system disks in to reinstall OS9 etc.?

any help or advice would be really welcome

[Big Mac]

There was hard drive corruption of some sort. The flashing icon at startup signifies that the OS cannot be loaded. Disk Warrior should get you back up and running. If it does not, or if you do not wish to purchase it, you'll have to reinstall the OS.

[kick52]

whats the difference between the smiling mac ? and the floopy disk?

i put a 20gb in my imac with os x and os 9 on it, but it freezes with os x and when i try and boot it in to os 9 a floppy comes up... it works ok with that 6gb though...

[jhsos]

thanks 4 the tips- but like i say i can't get the disk that's in the machine out to put another in. Machine just boots flashes question mark for a bit then a smiling mac face and it just stalls in that state. . .

arg

[chris v]

Originally Posted by jhsos

thanks 4 the tips- but like i say i can't get the disk that's in the machine out to put another in. Machine just boots flashes question mark for a bit then a smiling mac face and it just stalls in that state. . .

arg

Hold the mouse button down while restarting. That should force-eject the CD.

[jhsos]

Aah - Got the disk out thanks. . .

yet more questions i'm afraid . .

Do i need a specific version of diskwarrior for Mac OS 9? - I looked at the V3 version- says minimum spec MAC OS X.2.1

Someone else suggested changing pram battery

Also is it worth trying to use firewire connection to mount the contents of the hard drive onto another computor in case they get lost or damaged on reinstalling OS

And when it comes to that - Is it best to do a clean reinstall.

Among other whings the Norton scan complained about multiple system folders - so I guess that may well have something to do with my problems . . . .

[jmmo20]

The boot screen comes up normal, with the grey apple logo in the center of the screen. After the little shades of grey pinwheel comes up. Next the screen goes to solid blue with the mouse.


I nuked the PRAM and still nothing


I went in to single user mode and ran /sbin/fsck -fy to check the disk and it came up with no errors


I also ran disk utility from the boot disk and it came up with a problem "invalid leaf count should be 3 not 342"


Is this a problem?


I tried repairing it but it didn't fix it HELP ME!!! Thanks: dehodgs0

[chris v]

DiskWarrior.