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I'm posting this here and using Disk Utility in the title mostly because it seems to be related, in time, with my problem. I don't know that it really was the cause of my problems.
My wife has a G4 MAC, running OS X, 10.4.11. I ordered a 2TB Seagate FreeAgent Desktop external drive last week and it came in on Tuesday. (She does a LOT of photo restoration and movie work and pretty much filled up a 1TB drive in the last year or so.)
Since I am a "migratory engineer" and wouldn't be home until Friday night, she decided to try to install it. I got a call when she got lost on the Seagate site. I eventually got her onto the page where it gives directions for formatting and partitioning the new drive and started walking her through it.
So, with both of us, literally, on the same page, it went like this:
Run Disk Utility
Select the new drive
Select the partition tab
Set the name as Portable-2
Select the format for Mac OS Extended
She left the volume scheme as "current" (which is how it came up)
Set the checkbox to install Mac OS 9 disk drivers (don't know if we'll ever need that but didn't seem like a biggie)
Clicked Partition
got the warning box
Clicked Partition from the warning
Disk Utility went away...
She didn't get any indication that it was creating a filesystem and the new drive wasn't mounted when she checked (directions said it would be).
So we go through it again:
Run Disk Utility
Select the new drive
Select the partition tab
Set the name as Portable-2
Select the format for Mac OS Extended
She left the volume scheme as 1 partition (change here as having one ginormous partition was the point of the new drive)
Set the checkbox to install Mac OS 9 disk drivers
Clicked Partition
got the warning box
Clicked Partition from the warning
creating filesystem
when it was finished, the drive was mounted.
Everything looked good and my wife started copying files from the smaller portable drive to the new drive. Don't know how much she got moved but she shut the system down fairly soon as a thunderstorm started to move through the area.
Called me at work this morning and she was about ready to throw the Mac out the window:
When she booted it up:
her desktop was empty (both display and directory)
Safari had lost all bookmarks
the Finder window "looked different"
the i-movie icon in the dock was now the question mark icon (don't know if it's just the icon or if the file is gone, too)
Isn't much I can do at this point so I told her I'd look around for ideas and see what I could do this weekend.
She called me after lunch nearly crying; she'd tried to use e-mail and got the "Welcome to..." window and all her e-mail addresses appear to be gone. At this point, she's afraid to touch it for fear of making things even worse. And I can't blame her but I also can't tell the extent of the problem.
Caveat: I was helping her remotely so I couldn't look over her shoulder. It's possible she hit something she didn't realize but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I'm reasonably sure she selected the right drive; if she had gotten the wrong one, I would expect that drive to have been wiped and both external drives seems ok and the system did boot. Or would Disk Utility protect the system enough that some things would work but she'd lose options and data other than some system files?
So I guess 2 questions to start with:
What is the effect of leaving the partition scheme as "current" when you try to partition a new drive?
Most importantly, is there any way to recover? My only thought, at this point, is to run Disk Utility in verify mode and see what it thinks about the boot disk. If it decides there are problems, I can boot to the install disk and have Disk Utility try to repair it.
Any chance this is a case of "invisibles?" PinkMutant says drives and folders can go invisible but doesn't mention files. That's another thing I can check this weekend.
Sorry for the long post but thanks in advance.
My wife has a G4 MAC, running OS X, 10.4.11. I ordered a 2TB Seagate FreeAgent Desktop external drive last week and it came in on Tuesday. (She does a LOT of photo restoration and movie work and pretty much filled up a 1TB drive in the last year or so.)
Since I am a "migratory engineer" and wouldn't be home until Friday night, she decided to try to install it. I got a call when she got lost on the Seagate site. I eventually got her onto the page where it gives directions for formatting and partitioning the new drive and started walking her through it.
So, with both of us, literally, on the same page, it went like this:
Run Disk Utility
Select the new drive
Select the partition tab
Set the name as Portable-2
Select the format for Mac OS Extended
She left the volume scheme as "current" (which is how it came up)
Set the checkbox to install Mac OS 9 disk drivers (don't know if we'll ever need that but didn't seem like a biggie)
Clicked Partition
got the warning box
Clicked Partition from the warning
Disk Utility went away...
She didn't get any indication that it was creating a filesystem and the new drive wasn't mounted when she checked (directions said it would be).
So we go through it again:
Run Disk Utility
Select the new drive
Select the partition tab
Set the name as Portable-2
Select the format for Mac OS Extended
She left the volume scheme as 1 partition (change here as having one ginormous partition was the point of the new drive)
Set the checkbox to install Mac OS 9 disk drivers
Clicked Partition
got the warning box
Clicked Partition from the warning
creating filesystem
when it was finished, the drive was mounted.
Everything looked good and my wife started copying files from the smaller portable drive to the new drive. Don't know how much she got moved but she shut the system down fairly soon as a thunderstorm started to move through the area.
Called me at work this morning and she was about ready to throw the Mac out the window:
When she booted it up:
her desktop was empty (both display and directory)
Safari had lost all bookmarks
the Finder window "looked different"
the i-movie icon in the dock was now the question mark icon (don't know if it's just the icon or if the file is gone, too)
Isn't much I can do at this point so I told her I'd look around for ideas and see what I could do this weekend.
She called me after lunch nearly crying; she'd tried to use e-mail and got the "Welcome to..." window and all her e-mail addresses appear to be gone. At this point, she's afraid to touch it for fear of making things even worse. And I can't blame her but I also can't tell the extent of the problem.
Caveat: I was helping her remotely so I couldn't look over her shoulder. It's possible she hit something she didn't realize but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
I'm reasonably sure she selected the right drive; if she had gotten the wrong one, I would expect that drive to have been wiped and both external drives seems ok and the system did boot. Or would Disk Utility protect the system enough that some things would work but she'd lose options and data other than some system files?
So I guess 2 questions to start with:
What is the effect of leaving the partition scheme as "current" when you try to partition a new drive?
Most importantly, is there any way to recover? My only thought, at this point, is to run Disk Utility in verify mode and see what it thinks about the boot disk. If it decides there are problems, I can boot to the install disk and have Disk Utility try to repair it.
Any chance this is a case of "invisibles?" PinkMutant says drives and folders can go invisible but doesn't mention files. That's another thing I can check this weekend.
Sorry for the long post but thanks in advance.