21 Dec
2006
21 Dec
'06
6:22 a.m.
Brent Hilpert wrote:
Tom Uban wrote:
I don't know what has gone wrong yet and all of the advice from you mac
experts is quite useful. I used the mac as a tool and never bothered to
learn about the intricacies of the OS, etc. as I am primarily a Unix
person.
--tom
I have a mac powerbook 150 circa 1994 which was
an odd beast for apple
at the time as it used an IDE drive to help reduce the cost. I have
been using this machine to run MIDI recording software until recently
when the hard drive has had some sort of failure, either software or
hardware, I'm not sure which yet. The result is that when the machine
attempts to boot, it does not recognize the formatting on the disk. I
would like to try to recover the data (if possible) before re-formatting
the drive, and I've heard that a program call disk warrior might be
the solution. Does anyone have any comments or suggestions on this?
.. don't know if this is any help or if you are already beyond this stage:
There is a program from Apple: "Disk First Aid" that comes with the system
install disks (CD or floppies) for the Classic systems. If you have the
install disks you should be able to boot from them, run Disk First Aid and it
may be able to fix the hard disk.
Disk First Aid is not comprehensive though: for trashed-disk problems that I
have had, sometimes it has been able to recover the disk and sometimes it
hasn't. When it hasn't, other programs have sometimes been able to do the
recovery. The 'other programs' that I have are on another machine, I could
fire it up to recall which was 'best' in my experience.
Do you know that the problem is trashed formatting (file structure), as
opposed to trashed system files, that are causing the boot to fail?
If it is the latter you may be able to, again, boot from the install media,
and reinstall just the system files without having to reformat the disk
(and not disturb your data files).
Or if you can you can find an opportunity to install the disk as a secondary
(non-boot) disk on another Mac, you may be able to access your data files
immediately, copy them off, then reinstall the system, or reformat.