imac G5 crash

Trying to salvage a bad situation. Our imac 21.5" was working fine, froze, turned it off, back on, white screen. First nothing. Later white screen with folder and flashing question mark.

I have tried the reboots posted on the web, no luck. Put in the OS disk 1 and through utilities I and see the drive but can't access it. Here is where I am at:

With the OS Disk (10.5.2) installed I tried the utilities. I wanted to take the easy way out and restore, but I can't pick, pull, type, curse the drive into the soruce window. (when I do a verify I get the error message "invalid node structure", with repair, "invalid sibling link").

I want to try a safe mode boot (again), but the OS disk is in the machine and won't eject. Am following web hints on this and will hopefully get it out in a while.

If there are no other solutons that some of you know of, I want to do the following.
Remove the hard drive from the IMAC.
put it into an hdd docking station cradle and use it as an external drive,
copy all data across our macbook pro througha 4 port usb 2.0 mini hub directly into a 1TB Iomega external drive.

Any thoughts or insights would be greatly appreciated. And no haven't backed up anything yet, hence the urgency in my post.

maccrash said:

Trying to salvage a bad situation. Our imac 21.5" was working fine...

With the OS Disk (10.5.2) installed I tried the utilities.

Click to expand...

If you truly have a 21.5" iMac...the first problem I see is you cannot use that 10.5.2 OS disk. It is too old to be used on a 21.5" iMac. The "oldest" OS that can be installed on a 21.5" iMac is OS 10.6.1.

Once you have at least an OS 10.6.1 or later OS disk...then try what you've tried again.

HTH,

- Nick

Good point

Sorry I posted the wrong size..it is a 20" bought in 2009.

It is the original disks and they are 10.5.2

Thanks

maccrash said:

Sorry I posted the wrong size..it is a 20" bought in 2009.

It is the original disks and they are 10.5.2

Click to expand...

Ok...that sounds better. When I saw "21.5 iMac" and "OS 10.5.2" in the same sentence...I was figuring something wasn't quite right!

From your original post where you mentioned being able to boot from your OS disk...but not able to access the hard drive. Just so I understand what you're seeing...are you saying that when you open Disk Utility...your hard drive shows up in the list on the left side of the window...but you cannot "select" it (it's name is "grayed-out")?

Does Disk Utility show the hard drives correct name?

It is always possible that your HD is damaged...thus your plan of:

- removing the drive
- installing it in an external HD case
- copying all important files

...is what I would do if all else fails. I would then reformat the drive...and run some sort of hardware diagnostic program on it to check if it is damaged or not. If it passes...then I would use it as a backup drive...if it doesn't pass...then I would trash it.

Good luck,

- Nick

Hi Nick,

Yes your understanding is correct. It shows up on the left side, gives the correct size and space available, but I am un able to select it. But when I try to do a restore it doesn't show up.

That's what I was afraid of but I had a similar problem with my PC that way and it worked.

The problem continues

I have replaced the crashed IMAC 20" drive and reinstalled all software and OS10.5.2. Now I am trying to get some of the data back from the crashed drive. A Mac friend of mine looked at it and said he was able to see the files and that all I needed to do was go in and make a disk image and drop the crashed drive into the new disk image and my files would be restored....not quite. I am still not able to locate any of the documents that I need. I am able to find some and even open them from the original crashed drive but not the 275gb of files and pics I do need to salvage.

Have I misunderstood the steps of getting this to work? I though that if I droped the old disk image into the clone it would take days for 298gb of data to download. It took about and hour to set up the 300gb desktop image and, after I dropped the old disk image on it...10 sec to see a image of the old disk. Any thoughs would be appreciated on how to do this correctly.

Thaks for you help and ideas.
Maccrash