01-17-2007, 10:36 AM

Hi guys, I am new to this type of thing so I hope you will bear with me.

I have a powermac G5 and external Maxtor 60Gb Firewire Hard Drive and am running Nortons utilities. On start up Nortons checks the external drive and on the last occasion it froze the mac before it finished the scan. On restarting the icon has disappeared from the desktop and I am unable to access the drive.

Any suggestions as to what might be the problem.

Regards

Dmac

01-17-2007, 09:06 PM

While the computer is on, try to unplug and then plug in the external HD.

01-17-2007, 10:03 PM

Welcome to Mac-Forums, David Mackay!

A word of advise: do not, I repeat, DO NOT use Norton Utilities on ANY Mac OS X volume or system. If you really want to mess up your Mac, that's one of the best ways to do it.

It worked well in the pre-OS X days but not anymore. About three years ago there even was a class-action lawsuit by Mac OS X users against Norton's. Norton's thrashes countless Mac OS X hard drives. They, of course, settled out of court.

01-17-2007, 11:36 PM

Disable Norton and try again. If it doesn't show up on your desktop, check Disk Utility to see if anything shows up there. Do you know what format this disk is in? Presumably you have used it before, or is it a new add to your system?

01-18-2007, 03:00 PM

Thanks for the advice. I have removed Nortons - any suggestions for a replacement???

Plugged and unplugged - no effect!

The HD has been used on OS9 and OSX so am assuming that it is properly formatted.
The device appears in the system profiler but when I check in the disk utility, neither my internal HD or the Maxtor are there. It seems that the utility bis freezing!!!!!!

Frustration is now setting in!!!

Any other suggestions - Thanks

01-18-2007, 03:02 PM

Sorry guys the disk utility is responding and the Maxtor is showing but all the verifier and repair buttons are dimmed.

Regards

01-18-2007, 05:53 PM

Click on over to the Erase tab in Disk Utility and you should be able to reformat it. Let us know how that goes.

01-19-2007, 04:13 AM

Thanks Mac57

Unfortunately I have files that I need before I reformat. Any suggestions as to how I can recover these before reformatting.

01-19-2007, 10:51 AM

I hate to suggest this, but what format is that drive in? Could you use a ...gasp... Windows box to read the files off and save them?

If the drive is HFS+ (the native Mac OS X format) you can still use Windows, but you will need a commercial package like MacDrive (http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6) to allow your PC to read it.

If this isn't an option, I am close to out of ideas, other than suggesting that you try the drive on another Mac.

Alternately of course, if you have access to a Linux box somewhere, you can plug the drive in and read the files off from there.

No matter what, I suspect that you may need the aid of another computer to finish this task.

01-19-2007, 02:44 PM

The drive was formatted on OS9 and nothing extra was done to the drive when I moved if from my G3 to my G5 (e.g new drivers etc) I have since tried it on another G5 and still have the same problem.

No icon on the desktop, but visible in Disk Utilities etc. At present the drive is a firewire only and am having problems finding a PC with the Firewire connections.

01-19-2007, 03:59 PM

I may be the king of the dumb suggestions today, but here is another one. Do you still have that G3? If you do, you are set! Save your files off to that G3. Take your drive back to your G5 and format it. Then copy the files across your network from the G3 to the G5. Done? Don't tell me you don't have a network... please! :-)