File Systems

[muthabored]

If I take the hard drive out of my PowerBook G4 (running OS X) and slave it to a PC running Windows XP Pro, will I able able to see the data & move it? The laptop has an EXTREMELY distorted/garbled display (connecting to external monitor shows the same so I suspect it to be the logic board).

 

[Welshbird]

I would guess your hard-drive will be formatted wrongly.

BTW - You probably don't have to take the drive out in order to make it a slave - if you can connect to another mac (via Firewire cable) then boot this one that you need to get data out whilst holding down the 'T' key.

Info here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583

Fee

"The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea." Isak Dinesen

 

[muthabored]

Well, I've discovered how to boot into Safe Mode so the screen looks "normal" now. Before the problem with the display returns I'd like to be able to back up the data to either multiple DVDs/CDs or an external drive. Each time I insert a DVD or CD or connect an external drive, I receive the following:

You have inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OS X can read. To continue with the disk inserted, click ignore

Is there a work around for this or another way to get the data off of this G4?

 

[jmgalvin]

If you can boot into safe mode and it looks ok, your problem is most likely caused by a software problem.

Rather than go through all the normal fixit steps for osx, it might be just as easy to reinstall the system via anArchive and Install (preserving all settings, etc.). You can read more about archive and install in Help. You do an archive and install by going to Options on the osx installer, but read up on it first. Before install an os, make sure to run disk utility and repair the HD from the installer disk. You will also find Hardware test on the installer cd/dvd. You can run that to see if it reports andy hardware problems.

As for various drives, Open disk utility and see if the various drives show up in the left pane. If not, Click on mac hard drive in the left pane and then hit the Repair Permission button and see if that helps. If you're plugging in an external HD, you'll have ot format it for mac. Clcik on it in the left pane of disk utility and then clcik the Erase button. Select Mac os extended, journaled as the format. The mac should recognize the drive after that.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4 & G5