Help Hd Problem!

noah93noah93
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Help, I was hearing sounds like electricity jumping from place to place in the lower left-hand corner of my 12" g4 PB, exactly where the HD is a few days ago. At the time, I disregarded, but now things have gotten worse. First, I opened word, only to find out I was missing 300 fonts. So I run DU repair permissions and verify disks, and low and behold, the outcome!







I have thousands of $'s worth of applications and music, I am currently backing up, but I would like to save my HD. WHAT CAN I DO????





Noah

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    Is your Mac of recent enough vintage to have a FireWire port, and to be able to go into "Target Disk" mode by booting up the computer while holding down the "T" key?



    If so, and if you have access to another Mac, you could try connecting your Mac with the disk problem, running in Target Disk mode, to the other Mac, and then you'll be able to run the Repair option which is grayed out in that picture -- the problem being that you can't repair a drive that you're booted up on.



    There are also disk utilities you can buy which are more powerful that Apple's system tools (Disk Warrior, Tech Tools Pro), which will boot from CD on most Macs -- such tools, however, often lag behind being bootable on the latest Mac models.



    It might also be possible -- it's been a long time since I've had to worry about this, as I almost always have multiple Macs around -- that there's an option on your OS X install discs to do basic disk repair by booting from CD or DVD.



    Try to back up as much as you can first, but avoid doing anything that writes new files, or modifies or deletes old files, until you get your disk repaired. You might lose some data in the process of salvaging your drive, but you just have to try and hope for the best.



    There are data recovery tools that can help rescue some of your lost data after the drive has been repaired, but that's a very hit and miss proposition.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    Hi Noah,



    Don't panic! This problem doesn't look too serious.



    See this thread for my advice.



    Of course, you should finish your backup first, and keep said backup updated in any case in future, as you never know what might happen.
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