Strange HD trouble. Ever heard of this weirdness? Please help!

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Against my better instinct and experience, I used my brother's G4 mac mini as a backup HD, including recently as the *only* location I saved my most important (huge) folder to.

After he stuck a folded business card into the optical drive to get a disk out, his machine suddenly went into a kernel panic every time he tried to start up.

I put it into target disk mode, and it is screwey: it will not mount on any other machine, but as long as the FW cable is plugged into the other machine, the other machine's disk utility just sits there saying "gathering disk infomation."

When I start up pressing down 'option' to select a system folder, it shows the mac mini's system folder.

When I attempt to start up from the system folder of another machine, it hangs up at the startup progress bar saying "waiting for local disks."

If I attempt to start up from an install disk, it says something similar while hanging up.

I've never seen anything like this.

At this point all I want is to recover my folder.

Any ideas?

Put the mini in the freezer?

Any help would be profusely appreciated.

Thanks

Jenn


UPDATE: My brother tells me he tried a bunch of "reset" keystrokes while trying to get it to start up while I was gone. One was option-command-p-r, and the other he doesnt remember. One of them changed the screen resolution to where everything is big (?!), but what was strange is that everything is big regardless of what we're trying to start up from. Is there some keystroke that might screw up a firmware driver for the HD or something weird like that?
 

chscag

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Your Mac's Specs
2017 27" iMac, 10.5" iPad Pro, iPhone 8, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 Mini, Numerous iPods, Monterey
I'm not really sure what's going on with your brother's Mini, but at this point in time you might want to try this: Remove the hard drive from his Mini and place it in an external carrier or use an adapter - then attach it to your Mac and get your data off that way.
 
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Thanks, I'll try that.

We did isolate the HD as the problem by removing only it and flawlessly starting up from another computer in target disk mode and from an install disk.

This is the first time I've ever not had a backup of my data, and it's a major, major data loss to me.
 

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