broken ibook - want to rescue data from disk

I have an ibook G3 800, which is up the spout. The screen is dead, as is the external connection to a monitor. I know it still boots and I can switch it on, let it boot up, log in and shut it down, all without the screen.

What I have done is take out the 2.5 inch HDD and put it in an external USB enclosure and try to attach it to a Fedora Core 6 x86 PC via USB, but I cannot read the disk. The led on the enlosure just goes red when it should be green (another HDD confirms this). There are also various IO errors in dmesg and in the messages file, and fdisk says "unable to open /dev/sda".

What I want to know : is there something special about Apple ibook HDDs (the disk states on it that it has Apple firmware), that would prevent me from connecting it to a PC?

you can just keep the HD in the ibook and plug it into another mac with a firewire cable and boot it into firewire target disc mode mode.

firewire target disc mode: Here

skye23412 said:

you can just keep the HD in the ibook and plug it into another mac with a firewire cable and boot it into firewire target disc mode mode.

firewire target disc mode: Here

Click to expand...

Oh to have another MAC. That would be great. I only have the one, hence the PC external HDD route.

The reason is doesn't work with Fedora is because the HD for your Mac isn't formatted in the format that is used by Windows and Linux (Mac uses HFS+ and Windows and Linux use the FAT file system). Your best bet is to plug it into another Mac, maybe even bring it to the Apple Store, I'm sure they would happily retreive your lost data for, and maybe interest you in a new Mac.

rogueace said:

The reason is doesn't work with Fedora is because the HD for your Mac isn't formatted in the format that is used by Windows and Linux (Mac uses HFS+ and Windows and Linux use the FAT file system). Your best bet is to plug it into another Mac, maybe even bring it to the Apple Store, I'm sure they would happily retreive your lost data for, and maybe interest you in a new Mac.

Click to expand...

Linux actually uses ext2/3 filesystems by default, but can support many filesystem types, including the filesystem used by Apple; HFS+. Also, Windows uses NTFS, not FAT. It used to, but not any more.

The problem I am having would appear to be hardware related. I assume there is a special firmware on the disk itself. If the problem were merely filesystem type related, then I would be able to open the disk in fdisk and wipe it clean. I cannot even do that.

Never mind, I remembered that I had set DHCP on the iBook's network card, so I wired it up to the network, switched on the DHCP server and dragged everything off the drive onto the Linux host that way.

Still would like to know what makes the disk not work in other machines though...