What the heck happened???

[Gil]

I was on my iBook G4 tonight, when the machine froze up. I thought it was due to having a lot of tabs open in FireFox. I did the Command-Option-Escape command, but nothing came up. So I held the power switch. I turn it back on, and I get the New World Mac blinking question mark equivilent. I reset PRAM, and same thing. What the heck could have happened to it?

 

[equill]

Will the 'Book boot from a CD/DVD, or a bootable external drive, or in target disk mode so that you can interrogate it from another Mac? What you describe could be a very proper response from the Mac to a failed HDD, ie 'I can't find a valid startup volume'. It could not quit an inaccessible Finder, and PRAM plays no part (other than 'What startup volume is it on?') in finding the boot volume's pointers to where it's all at.

de

 

[Gil]

I was able to boot from the Tiger DVD, and I opened up Disk Utility, but no Hard Drives were listed.

The only other Mac that has FireWire is a Beige G3. I don't know if that would work.

Rescuing data is crucial.

 

[superpantoufle]

I was able to boot from the Tiger DVD, and I opened up Disk Utility, but no Hard Drives were listed.
The only other Mac that has FireWire is a Beige G3. I don't know if that would work.

Rescuing data is crucial.

Oops. I mean, really. Disk Utility not seeing your drive is usually really, really bad news. :'(

Try to boot the iBook in target mode (T pressed at startup until you see a purple logo and the FireWire logo). The G3 shouldn't have any problems mounting your iBook's drive, as long as it's not dead. If it can't, again, bad news.

Does the drive make any unusual noise? Or, does it still make any noise? As equiil said, what you described is very consistent with a fatal hard drive failure.

Some were lucky in making their broken drive work long enough to backup crucial data by cooling it several hours in the fridge, but I sadly never was. Irrelevant for an iBook, but pretty cool to see is this old news from the french site macbidouille.com. It basically says that the guy was able to get his data back using those cooling plates, changed every hour. Copying 20 Gb of data from his failing drive took 28 hours at an average 200 Kb/s.

Sorry for those bad news… but to end on a positive note, I have to tell the story of a friend of mine loosing some pretty important data from an iBook G4 a couple of weeks ago (one week of work since the last backup). Just as yours, his drive wouldn't show up in Disk Utility nor from another Mac, nor when booting the iBook from an external HD. Then a few days later, when he had already ordered a new drive and begun his work over, the faulty drive suddenly mounted after a reboot. He immediately copied everything on the external HD. A few more reboots, and the drive was gone for good in Digital Heaven.

 

[tomlee59]

Remove the drive, put it in an external USB case, and see if it's readable there. If not, try the cooling trick (it works by lowering the noise in the read channel, but the amount of reduction is small, so it succeeds only in those rare instances where the degradation is itself small); it can't hurt (aside from condensation), and it could help.

Good luck.

And this is a good opportunity to remind ourselves to back up our data now, if we have been remiss in doing so.

 

[register]

In case the data on your disk is precious consider to pay for a professional data recovery service. Such service includes the work done in a clean room, any needed software, technical documentation, spare drive mechanics and electronics at hand. A skilled person would retrieve the data to a new harddisk you receive in return for the damaged one (this might cost something like a grand, however).

Think twice before attempting to perform any treatment to the disk drive that may cause irreparable damage to the stored data.

 

[Gil]

Does the G3 need to have the same OS as the iBook when doing the Target Disk dealy? It has OS 8.6.

I remember, the computer froze with the beach ball cursor, the hard drive crankin away.

I was talking to my piano teacher, and the same thing happened to a friend of his. He took it to the Apple store, and they were able to get the data off. I dunno exactly what they did.

 

[equill]

Target Disk mode makes the target (victim?) drive into an insensate appendage of the host computer, just as if it were physically installed as an internal drive of the host.

If your 'Book's drive then responds to Apple's disk utilities from the G3, mirabile visu. If not, resist the urge towards hara kiri while you get hold of some more powerful disk utilities: LaCie's Silverlining, FWB's Hard Disk ToolKit, Intech's Hard Disk SpeedTools or ATTO's utility. Silverlining and HDST certainly use Apple's partition scheme for HDDs, and almost certainly so do the other two.

If your dud drive mounts on the desktop of the G3, you are already a long way forward. (It is not impossible that the 'Book's HD data cable became loose, or failed.) Indeed, use of DiskWarrior 2.1.1 (or 3.0.x under OS X) to straighten out a corrupted file directory may be all that you then need to see your files again. DW will do nothing, however, to replace a dud HD driver, for which you will need one of the foregoing. Silverlining has a good GUI, which is both intuitive and revelatory of the drive's condition. Just do not invoke any option to repartition the drive, recreate the file system or erase the drive. All of these preceding utilities (except DW 3.0.x) need that you work in OS 8.6 or 9.1+.

If, after all this, it comes down to a mucked-up partition scheme, you are in professional recovery territory. This is rare, and most often the result of mechanical rather than software failure.

Best of luck, and success, to you.

de

 

[tomlee59]

Target Disk mode makes the target (victim?) drive into an insensate appendage of the host computer, just as if it were physically installed as an internal drive of the host.

The only reason for the advice I gave is that it bypasses everything in the gronked 'book, so one need make no assumptions about the health of the disk controller, connector, etc., for example. But I agree that Target Disk mode should be tried first, since it's easy. If that doesn't work, there's still hope that an external enclosure may yield joy.

 

[Gil]

I tried the Target Disk Mode, but it didn't show up on the host (G3). When I start up the 'Book, I put my ear to the area where the hard drive is, and it can definitely hear it spin up. The drive definitely works, it's just being uncoopertive. I think the G3 can't see it since its an OS X Partition (which is journaled or something).

 

[bluekatt]

And this is a good opportunity to remind ourselves to back up our data now, if we have been remiss in doing so.

which is pretty much the reason i rarley store my files on the actual hard drive any more and stick to external hard drives usb sticks and sd drives

 

[Christopher]

Most likely the hard drive just croaked at that point.

 

[equill]

Whether in target disk mode or housed in an external enclosure, which are both perfectly suitable starting points for mounting the 'Book's HDD on the desktop of the G3, the 'Book's HDD has to declare itself as containing a mountable volume/partition. The HDD's disk driver (which resides in one of the several invisible partitions of the drive) is the go-between, but the data partition, which is the 'volume' that gets mounted, has to be recognized as such. This means that it has to be pointed out as a data volume (not necessarily bootable in the case of a pure storage volume) and in a suitable (HFS/HFS+) file format. If this isn't happening, get hold of a version of DiskWarrior suitable to the host OS and see what DW tells you. DW may even volunteer to 'repair critical values in the volume wrapper' or somesuch, and, having done so, allow the volume to be mounted. There is much that you can do before your second throws your towel into the ring for you. Pecker up and press on.

de

 

[Gil]

I think I have that Silverlining software that came with my LaCie 500GB USB drive when I got it last year. I'll check that out.

 

[Gil]

So this is what I was able to get out of Silverlining Pro.

Pic

Text

 

[equill]

And I thought that Silverlining 6.5.8 (with FireWire firmware update) was the latest and last for 9.2.2. However, the news that 6.5.9 gives you is the most chilling that can be received: 'Not ready'. It shows you that the drive's Partition 1 content:

Name: Apple

Type: Apple_partition_map

Start block = 1

Block count = 63

is invisible/unreadable by the driver AppleFireWireStorageDriver v1.2.3, and therefore Partitions 2-7 (of which 6 is the mountable 'volume') are also invisible/unreadable. You should certainly try to reinstall the driver onto the problem drive, but Silverlining may not want to do so. That will then be the time for DW 2.1.1 (bootable into OS 9.2.x) to be run over the drive for a last-ditch possibility, although it usually cannot do anything if the partition scheme is not intact/readable. After that ...

de

 

[Gil]

Yikes - All this because of a lock-up. :O

 

[Dennis Nedry]

I bet the hard drive failed first and that's what caused the lock-up.

 

[Gil]

This may be the dumbest question ever, but you can't hook a 2.5" laptop drive onto a 3.5" IDE connection, correct?