Cannot boot after Norton Emergency Repair

[nekoly]

Hi... I'm fairly new to macs. My powerbook was having some major problems with directories and such. So I booted the mac to the Norton CD to do an emergency repair. That went fine, but now I can't seem to boot it to the harddrive. I've tried holding to Option key or C key but nothing works. My PB is hooked up to a monitor so I've tried unhooking it but all I see on the PB screen is black...and very faded in the background is either a mac icon with a ? blinking or two buttons with a revolving arrow or an arrow pointing to the right.

Powerbook G4 1.25 OSX 10.2.x.x 512mb

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Aptmunich]

Norton is ALWAYS a nono when it comes to mac problems from what I've heard...

I think that your drive index has been corrupted by the utility somehow, try starting up with your OS X install disks in the drive and hold C.

Then do an archive and reinstallation if it recognises the old partition...

 

[Macman]

yea, your problems were probably easily fixable had you asked before using norton products, and its lkikely that norton utilities caused the damage to your directories as Ive seen it do many times. there are lots of apps for 'repairing' a problem on your mac, but that doesnt mean theyre good or work.

 

[nekoly]

Thank you for your help. I will try your advice and see how it goes. I did not realize Norton was a bad thing for Macs. Is there another anti-virus/repair/security software that's more reliable for macs?

 

[Macman]

there are no viruses. all you need if anything is cocktail, and maybe diskwarrior or techtool or something similiar.

 

[rman]

From what I have read, disk warrior would be your best bet.

 

[nekoly]

okay....here's the update. I am extremely afraid... I've started the mac with OSX CD and ran disk utility...my hard disk is almost completely unused!!!! Have I wiped out my hard disk?!?! OH MY GOSH!!! I am too afraid to do anything until I can find out what happened. Here are the steps I took with Norton.

1) uninstalled norton
2) changed startup disk in preferences to boot to norton
3) booted mac using norton cd
4) used disk doctor to repair problems - couldn't fix a few things
5) used volume recover - create & view virtual disk
6) rebuilt disk (i probably shouldn't have)
7) ran disk doctor again - was able to fix all problems
8) tried to reboot to hard disk - mac could not see the HD
9) boot mac using OSX cd - this is when i found out that my HD only has 1 file and 4 folders on it. what happened??


Please help... I need this for work.

Thank you.

 

[Macman]

you should stay away from norton as weve posted above, disk warrior should solve the problem, or maybe techtool. another thing to try is hook that mac to another mac running os x and boot using target disk mode, then use disk utiolity or just reinstall the os.

 

[nekoly]

I understand what you said about Norton, but I used it before knowing that it's not good to use. I haven't used it since.

Unfortunately, I do not have either of those software nor do I have another mac. Is there a way for me to recover my data or should I just reinstall OSX?

Thank you for all your help.

 

[Macman]

if you can connect it to another mac, you may be able to recover the data.

 

[Phiber]

Perhaps you should employ someone who is versed in these things you are trying to accomplish. If you had anything of great value on your hard drive, I would suggest you not touch the computer and take it to a data recovery service for them to save your information.

 

[rman]

I would invest in a copy of Disk Warrior. Or you may want to look at companies like Drive Savers.