hi there everyone, I have a rather unfortunate and somewhat urgent problem which i was hoping someone here might be able to help me with. I have an Applemac G4, and in this Mac are 2 harddrives -
One of them is 60Gb and the other is 100Gb or something like that, and is partitioned up into an OS9 partition, an OSX partition and 2 storage partitions.
Unexpectedly, one of them packed in - fortunately, it was the 60Gb one - so it was a pain, since it was full, but at least the Mac still works - and the most important stuff is still around.
So... it basically just sits there and starts clicking randomly, and everything slows down or seizes up for several minutes until the noise stops (and assumedly the harddrive stops trying to work properly and failing) , or sometimes it just seizes up and needs to be turned off - which as you can imagine, is crap.
I had a look to see if i could take out the harddrive. I don;t know which of the two in there is the wonky one since due to the amazingly poor design of the G4 case it is almost impossible to get in there - the damn thing has the harddrives bolted in with the screws in a position where, from what i can tell, it is impossible to unscrew them - the G4 case is no joke !
or perhaps it is, but a cruel one. So.... the gods-be-damned thing is stuffed in there and I can;t get it out.
Now, I am going away for 2 months tomorrow afternoon.
Before then, i want to find SOME way of disabling this obnoxious crappy harddrive..... another reason i don't want to take it out is that it will be a pain, another pain toget it back in, it will be a hassle and i have to spend my time tonight packing, and i still nurture a hope that i can get it working again, even if just once, enough to flood off the 60 Gb worth of data on there, onto a 250Gb external drive which i got recently (ironically, right after the 60 Gb drive packed in
i had intended to put the data onto it, but obviously i can;t right now) , theoretically i could try dismantling the whole drive-carriage section-thing in the hope of getting at the harddrive screws, take everything out, examine the drives to find which is the dodgy thing, redo the jumpers, and stick the one i want back in, but obviously thats going to take a while and be annoying as hell, and i have no idea if things would all just be fine with that and still work afterwards (ie, unless my PC is set up to auto-detect all of the drives, that would send Windows screwy if i did that without re-running the BIOS harddrive detection, since it would still be expecting 2 drivs to be there rather than one : my PC is pretty old though, and obviously windows is a bumtastic heap of fetid crap - or windows M.E. or 98 are anyway, which are the versions which i have. I would assume that Mec OSX is a bit less ridiculous, but dont know how much so.) If i were using a PC, i could just hit delete during startup and tell the BIOS to ignore the drive completely, dont even recognise it's existence.
That's not hard - i have a 40Gb drive in my PC which is a bumworthy heap of crap sometimes, but which is fast and goes for months sometimes without a problem - I never really use my PC at all, so i don;t feel inclined to swap it for a better one. Sometimes the drive starts cheeping to itself when I'm using Windoze, but it doesn;t affect anything since the OS is utterly ignoring it.
If the crappy drive is detected by the PC BIOS, it acts like my Mac one is - it seizes up the OS and you have to turn off the power.
When i am away my mum would like to come round to my place to use the computer , since she has all sorts of issues with public computers (they dont let her view hotmail attachments, dont let her post at my online forum, all sorts of junk...) and has not got her own one.
She isn't technically minded, and I really wouldn't want to have to tell her 'yeah, the crappy harddrive might start clicking at you and stuff will randomly seize up, try waiting it out but if that doesnt work you will have to switch it off' , and her have to put up with it for 2 months, if it could be avoided.
So please (^^); if anyone can help me before i leave it would be much appreciated !
I tried to find stuff about this with google but all i learnd with is that there's no proper BIOS during startup, for the Mac... which, if that's right, seems like a glaring oversight and Achilles Heel, unless there is some other way to carry out BIOS tasks more easily, set up BIOS settings, etc using a Mac, somehow.
(^^); heeeellllllp
Thankyou !
