G4 HD unmounted

Hey all,

I've got an older iMac G4, I think 800 Hz and 60GB HD.

Anyway, somewhere down the line, the Macintosh HD became unmounted and I have not yet found a way to remount it.

I have tried going into Disk Utility and remounting it that way. I can't restore it. And I've tried connecting it to my other iMac via Firewire (starting the G4 while holding down T) but it does not show up on the desktop. It does show up on Disk Utility on the G5 but looks the same way as it does on the Disk Utility for the G4 (Macintosh HD lettering is gray).

I'd like to be able to get some stuff off of the G4 but if not it'd be great to just have it running again. (It's a beautiful computer and I think the best-looking iMac Apple has produced so far!)

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Gibberish? Or am I the only one that can't read that?

flavor of locke said:

Gibberish? Or am I the only one that can't read that?

Click to expand...

It was probably SPAM posted in a non Roman alphabet language. Greek, Russian, Chinese, etc.

To answer your original post..... You might want to try something like "Disk Warrior" or "Data Rescue II" from Prosoft.

Both are a bit pricey and there's no guaranty they'll be able to get your data back.

As for getting the G4 up and running again, you're probably looking at swapping out that hard drive for a new one and reinstalling OS X.

Regards.

How did the HD become unmounted in the first place? I'm just curious as to any insight. Thanks, chscag.

It can happen, I had to fix this on a friends iMac.
The only solution was to make a clean install in the end.

Originally, one of my dad's friends ran Norton Utilities on the computer, claiming it was "for Mac". I never got to look at it myself before he ran it, but the HD became unmounted after that.

That said, I couldn't restore the HD running a Mac OS X Install Disc.

It would have been a Mac version.
Try running FSCK to see what it comes up with.

When I tried to run fsck, at the bottom of the screen it read: "panic: We are hanging here..."

It gave me a laugh, at least.

Really? Never have I seen a message like that appear.
I'm quite sure your pulling our legs, it's not within the scope of terminal to put something like that I'm sure.
You only ever get "the Macintosh HD appears to be ok" or a load of text with node errors or invalid tree links.

Panic: we are hanging here - MacNN Forums

Panic: We are hanging here? [Archive] - AppleInsider

Apple - Support - Discussions - panic:We are hanging here....... ...

Wow, ok. I stand corrected, my bad. Weird message to see, but either way, it doesn't look good sadly.

I have only seen it in the terminal, but I was pretty sure I had seen that exact wording before so searched. If he is getting that running FSCK I wonder what is wrong with his hard drive. I have seen KP's when the hard drive was bad and could not be read from or written to. Had it happen on a G3 Blue and White tower with the original 20GB or around Maxtor hard drive. Kept getting KP's. Drive was shot.

Quite a lot I feel. I've come across it before as I said, but it is fixable in as much as restarting from scratch should sort it.

To the OP. I think you are going to need to try a fresh install if you can.

I've tried fresh install.

I'm picking up a copy of DiskWarrior within the next few days so I'll update you when I give that a whirl.

If a clean install didn't work, you need a new HD. Diskwarrior won't fix a broken drive.

So, just to let you guys know:

I did run DW on the ol' G4. I just did a direct connection via Firewire. Was able to get files off the drive (phew!) but couldn't restore the drive. Thanks for all your help though!