Hard drive issue (keys out of order)

Hello all, new to this forum

I apologize if this is in the wrong forum, was a little confused.

The computer is a Power Mac G5 (dual processor), OS 10.4

Initially when starting the computer it would load to a console screen asking for login, enter any login you wish press enter, asks for a password, regardless of what username or password used (weather it be the actually user account name and password) it would display briefly invalid login, console screen would dissapear and eventually reappear asking for login

For some reason I was not able to boot off an external device while this hard drive was still in the computer (apple logo would go off center and display some strange graphics and freeze). Unable to boot from a CD either.

Removed the hard drive, now I am able to boot from an external hard drive, ran memtest, 3 passes, found no errors, ran Techtool 4 Pro, found no errors with the rest of the hardware (hard drive not installed however)

Attempted to plug the original hard drive into another computer through an external case, drive would show in the disk utility but would not mount. Verify disk resulted in "Keys out of order" Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972), told myself to run a repair.

Before running a repair I did a disk duplication using terminal on another computer, cloned the entire drive to another drive as a backup before I proceeded with the repair. Cloned completed but was unable to mount this drive either (obviously as its a clone)

Proceeded to attempt a repair, given very similar message but saying first aid was unable to preform a repair.

Put the original hard drive back into the computer, tried holding down the shift key, computer would have the turning wheel, taking a lot longer than usual (maybe repairing) then suddenly the computer would shut down completely.

For some reason however I am now able to boot from an external hard drive with the original hard drive in the computer. Original HDD (now internal) still does not show up on OS.

After reading it seems disk warrior may be able to fix this problem (or make it worse?) I am beginning to think I may have to completely reinstall OS and wipe the drive (if the drive itself isnt damaged)

My only concern is if I were to wipe the drive and reload OS how would I be able to retrieve the data off the other cloned drive, as I cannot get it to mount (if I could then I should be able to do that to the original drive and not have to wipe install)

Its a bit of a catch 22, any advice would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Ah ha

Solved one problem, I connected the hard drive from the G5 to another mac with 10.5 installed, for some reason 10.5 was able to blast past the file structure damage and mount the drive so the files could be recovered.

Now using super duper to copy that drive onto another drive (this makes 2 back ups) then I suppose we may have to either use disk warrior to try and fix the original drive or clean erase and reinstall OS then super duper the copy back onto the original.

What a headach, hope this helps someone else in the future. 10.5 still wasnt able to repair the HDD but it could see the files!

Take care

PRSF

PRSF said:

I suppose we may have to either use disk warrior to try and fix the original drive or clean erase and reinstall OS then super duper the copy back onto the original.
What a headache, hope this helps someone else in the future. 10.5 still wasnt able to repair the HDD but it could see the files!

Click to expand...

At last! Someone else has received the 'Keys Out of Order" error message (use Search with eMac as the keyword).

Yes, I had an uncomfortably similar experience, and the problem is still there. I can do nothing about it at present (away from home base with my No 2 computer). I posted the problem to this and other forums and the responses were that the problem is serious, it is definitely a disk repair job, and/but that Apple's installation disk cannot do the job. Terrific!

It's Disk Warrior, or Reinstall(Archive & Install). I'm glad to read that you worked your way out of your predicament. In my case, I think I'll upgrade the eMac's hard drive while I'm going about fixing the disk problem. In fact, a new, replacement, bigger drive is cheaper than going the Disk Warrior way.