Unbootable hard disk?

After my iBook's HD took a dive and became unreadable, I was able to recover and repair it to a degree with DiskWarrior and Norton Filesaver.
Wouldn't boot from HD.
Then I reinstalled Sys 9.0 from CDROM.
Set HD as startup disk.
Get only flashing question mark disk image.
(if i insert system CDROM it'll start up fine from that and mount the HD)
Reset PRAM, but that changed nothing.
I'll probably have to re-initialize the whole sweet thing, but I would like to UNDERSTAND what is required of an internal HD beyond a properly installed system from CDROM.
?guess I may have to do clean install?
any alternatives?

96MB RAM / VM Off / January 2000 iBook (~300MHz?)

This may be too late, however:

In the Startup Disk control panel, click on your hard drive icon - then shut down, wait for a few seconds to
let the memory fully clear - then startup. If this doesn't work, then others with more knowledge may be
able to help.

WDL

No perfect answer. When you reinstalled OS that updated the driver, which helps. But in truth backup and reformat fixes problems that utilities don't see - and it could be damaged prefs, extensions, or other files.

Moving the Preferences folder out of the System Folder is worth trying to see if that helps.

ZAP PRAM should help. TechTool (freeware) can do a more thorough zap of PRAM and newer Macs use another area to store boot information and use open firmware. Using the System Disk or Startup Disk should though point to the boot partition. The problem could be in non-HFS invisible partition. And reformat may be only way.

Thanks for the help, I needed to get the TechTools, though it wasn't magic bullet in this case.
Reinitializing happens. :)

Follow-up. Would have been nice if Disk First Aid 8.6 was posted before this happened.

EVEN AFTER A CLEAN INSTALL, REFORMAT, COPY BACK, and zero fragmentation (but 40,000 files using 5 GB) this new DFA found wrapper problem and fixed to the volume system.

I'm glad Apple came out with it. I just wish that they had it a year ago;(

is Disk First Aid 8.6 signif improvement over 8.5.5 (which I have with Sys 9.0.4)?
Comes with a recent software update?

Yes, DFA 8.6 will repair the Wrapper error introduced with OS9 that DFA 8.5.x cannot fix.

Hi,

I have a related problem; my HD suddenly became unreadable/unbootable. I installed a fresh copy of OS 9 on another partition and ran Disk First Aid, which said that it found problems but couldn't repair them.

Which utility should I try first? Last time I used Norton Disk Doctor, it rendered the disk completely unusable (it didn't even show up in DFA afterwards).

Any suggestions? Thanks,

-Heady

Disk Warrior and TechTool v3 are other utils to try.

Disk Warrior recommends using that first, then a utility like TechTool.

-Al

Hi,

I didn't touch the dead partition at all (no TechTool or Disk Doctor), booted from the Mac OS 9 CD and ran DiskWarrior from a Zip (which was aptly named "Saviour").

And, well, the partition came back from the dead. And there was much rejoicing.

Lessons I learned: Backup, backup, backup.

Thanks!

-Heady

*removed by author

[This message has been edited by EricCherry (edited 12-18-2000).]

Hi,

I have had this exact problem. It is Not prefs or anything like that. Certain invisible files on the drive (don't know the names though) are responsible. To fix it you should try to recover data and then initialize it. Try to use programs like norton sparingly, they can do more harm than good.

Matthew,
Check out my site at www.totallymac.8m.com