Sorry if this if verbose but I've spent hours solid reading very similar but ultimately unhelpful/irrelevant posts around the web. I have an old iBook G4 (OS X 10.4) that a friend gave me when her employer was going to bin it. I've been using it with no issues for 2yrs now, it's slow but it handles email and web browsing ok. I was just looking around at its specs and couldn't remember where the HDD specs were and out of curiosity ended up in the Startup Disk preferences. The only options were Macintosh HD and network drive. As I have no use for the latter, I just decided while I was there to select the Mac HD and lock the setting. I found the drive specs elsewhere and decided to shut it down to pull the RAM as I wanted find the right match to upgrade it before my trip abroad in one month's time. I was very careful (as always) to ground myself through the entire process, not touch any pins etc, and put everything back exactly as it was (I've been a tech since 1997, just with Windows systems).
When I went to reboot, I got the flashing question mark/folder gray screen. Having never seen this before I began googling. To cut the rest short, I've since booted into the Startup Manager and let it rescan numerous times, but it never shows any drives to select. I've also reset the PRAM via Command-Option-P-R and later performed the "reset-nvram" and "reset-all" via the Open Firmware prompt (which I got to by pressing Tab from Startup manager). Attempting to boot with the following had no effect: shift, x, cmd-s, cmd-v.
I never had a start-up disk or install CD or anything with this machine as it was getting binned before my friend snagged it.
I really need it for this trip as was planning to backup/store photos from my DSLR on it and also check mail etc. However, there may be a chance that I can take it back to my friend's place of work while I'm there and have one of their techs copy the drive for me or maybe (???) get it booting again. But I'd greatly prefer to not go that route and do it myself if at all possible.
Failing that, is there any way I can access the drive from my Windows box to backup the contents?
When I went to reboot, I got the flashing question mark/folder gray screen. Having never seen this before I began googling. To cut the rest short, I've since booted into the Startup Manager and let it rescan numerous times, but it never shows any drives to select. I've also reset the PRAM via Command-Option-P-R and later performed the "reset-nvram" and "reset-all" via the Open Firmware prompt (which I got to by pressing Tab from Startup manager). Attempting to boot with the following had no effect: shift, x, cmd-s, cmd-v.
I never had a start-up disk or install CD or anything with this machine as it was getting binned before my friend snagged it.
I really need it for this trip as was planning to backup/store photos from my DSLR on it and also check mail etc. However, there may be a chance that I can take it back to my friend's place of work while I'm there and have one of their techs copy the drive for me or maybe (???) get it booting again. But I'd greatly prefer to not go that route and do it myself if at all possible.
Failing that, is there any way I can access the drive from my Windows box to backup the contents?