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gr33n · Nov 28, 2003, 05:16 PM

i have two HDDs inside G4/733 - one with osX 10.2.8 , other with os 9.2.2 ... all was fine ... somebody was at my computer when i was away and when i came back it took forever to boot into osX - grey screen with that turning knob ... sometimes managed to boot of cd - disk repair said it can't repair something, have done fsck -y and it took forever ... booted from os9 and ran disk warrior ... it did a lot of things ... tried repair permissions - it took forever ... now disk warrior from os9 goes on forever, and when i cancel it unmounted osX hdd ... now i can't boot into osX and neither into os9, as i get passed extensions, it almost starts loading desktop and then a ball forever ... well, maybe not forever - do i have to wait for more than 1 hour? probably it is trying to mount osX hdd, but can't ... from disk warrior, and osX cd disk utility i understand that some osX files are damaged, my directories are gone south, things are not maching it contents, etc & etc ... but all i saw was connected to osX stuff ... i have a couple of folders there which i wanna save, i don't need to save my mail or home directory ... i just want to mount it, copy my files and then i can erase, install new osX whatever ... but how to get it to life? can i try to install new osX on it, or if it is screwed then it won't install? actually it sometimes takes forever to boot from cd as well, as it probably still checks HDDs when booting from cd ...
it was better at the beginning - when i just noticed that something is wrong with osX hdd ... but in the process of repairing permissions, using disk utility's disk repair, fsck -y and disk warrior (ver 3 by the way) i got it royally screwed ...

could it be only osX stuff which is bad and won't let hdd live ... or all my other folders (in root directory) are also screwed?

in a week i'll get 15" 1,25 powerbook - it was so close ...

NYCFarmboy · Nov 28, 2003, 07:19 PM

This isn't really answer to your post..but might be of help IF you have a external firewire drive.

Plug in the firewire external drive.. boot up with a OSX (or 9) cd in your G4 holding the C key..... Install OSX (or 9) onto the external firewire drive.

Once done installing onto that, you should see your internal drives and be able to copy over the files you want to keep etc.

Then reinstall X (or 9) on your internal drive.

I had to go thru this yesterday... I had taken it upon myself to do some Thanksgiving cleaning on my computer and for whatever reason decided to choose NETWORK as the system to boot off of.

I don't know why I did it, I know it was dumb. Anyhow..once you do that, if you don't have a network operating system, you are screwed. I had to do the above work-around JUST to get back into my main computer to select my original operating system on my main drive to boot off of.

ugh.

Krusty · Nov 28, 2003, 07:27 PM

Originally posted by NYCFarmboy:

I had to go thru this yesterday... I had taken it upon myself to do some Thanksgiving cleaning on my computer and for whatever reason decided to choose NETWORK as the system to boot off of.

Can't you just hold down the Option key when booting ?? It brings up a list of bootable partitions and lets you choose which one to boot from. Is Option-booting disabled if you choose NETWORK or something

??

NYCFarmboy · Nov 28, 2003, 08:25 PM

Originally posted by Krusty:
Can't you just hold down the Option key when booting ?? It brings up a list of bootable partitions and lets you choose which one to boot from. Is Option-booting disabled if you choose NETWORK or something ??

LOL..thanks..I had no idea!!

I'll remember that for next time!

SSharon · Dec 1, 2003, 09:00 PM

to the original poster:
you may want to try physically unplugging one of the hard drives and then restarting.

I have a MDD with 2 hard drives and couldn't start up for whatever reason b/c it kept looking for local disks or whatever this just bypasses that and then I could change the startup disk burn backup cd's etc.

hope that helps . . . good luck

Sarc · Dec 2, 2003, 05:38 PM

you should try to run a Diagnose Tool on the HDD's ... DiskWarrior preferably however you could boot with the Jaguar CD's and run Disk Utility.
If you happen to have a 10.3 bootable CD, you could run Panther's Disk Utility that will check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your HDD's.
And SMART is always right (in my experience), if it says the disk is bad, then it's bad.