Mac in trouble Please Help

[sackerman1478]

Hello,

I have a G4 with OS X 10 running. I have an older Lacie EXternal Hard drive with priceless information (50 Gigs worth) and in the process of trying to back it up, the computer locked up and it had to be shutdown. I shutdown it down and found out that it would not mount. I purchased Disk Warrior and was able to regain access to all of my files. I then went to backup the disk. Itunes was open with nothing playing and mydesktop went blank. Everything on the computer was acting funny. I could not close itunes (it kept coming back) nor would things open. I also can not shut down the computer and the external drive is still connected so Im afraid it may do irreparable damage if I shut it down hard. Mac even identified that it needed to shutdown and said (Shutdown in 60 seconds, counted down and nothing happened). Can someone please advise me on my best course of action to try and cleanly shutdown the computer and reboot (Hopefully, it will remount the desktop). I am fairly new to Mac's so I would appreciate any help I can get. thanks.
Scott

 

[munkees]

I went though something like this, but I had 200GB of itunes movies, music and shows. I ended up buying filesalvage(cost $80), and recovered every file. I learnt my lesson and know have a 1TB disk(external) to back up my itunes which is now over 300GB, plus my system disk. I run my itunes from an external firewire dive(USB can not keep up for streaming the information like firewaire.)

If aslong as you are not writing to the external drive then just power everthing down. I lost all the boot records on my external, but filesalvage still could mount the disk and retrieve the data, eventhough MacOS X did not recognize the drive.

Good luck, hope you can work it out and don't despire.

Doing a hard shut down should not effect you external drive. Never has effected mine. my drive died due to powerfailure caused by a 3 1/2 year old pulling the plug

 

[CanadaRAM]

THe OS on your machine seems unstable. Shut it down and take your external drive to another Mac and back it up onto a second external drive. If the data is irreplaceable, don't even ask whether it's worth the $150 or so. Just do it.

Then when you have a backup, return to your machine and repair whatevers wrong with your boot drive.

Use DiskWarrior or DataRescue II if you have to.

 

[MattJessop]

I fully agree with the others on this - if your data is irreplacable then it's worth any cost to get back. You mentioned that nothing appears on your Desktop ,which probably means that your HDD is fine, that your OS isn't just recognising anything hardware.

I think it's a shame that this happened to you, because this is what many people by Macs to AVOID, and it's terrible to see it happen to anybody. MY personal advice to you would be to back up the external HDD if possible, then to possibly take your Mac to your local Apple store, as you mentioned that you are pretty new to Macs. The Apple guys will certainly do everything that they can to help you, and I hope they have some success.

I think everybody here would like to wish you the best of luck in retrieving your files. It's happened to a few of us in the past.

 

[sackerman1478]

Well I shutdown the computer and turned it back on and amazingly, my harddrive is intact and my desktop returned to the screen. I am still afraid to reconnect the Lacie and hope I can use Disk Warrior again since it was running when everything crashed previously. I am going to buy a hard drive to try and transfer the data to before I do anything else. thank you for your replies and helpful postings.

 

[mkrishnan]

What version of OS X are you using (i.e. what is the number after the 10... 10.4.9, etc?)? What format is the external drive in? Does it connect via FW or USB?

 

[sackerman1478]

i believe it is Mac OS X 10.4.7

The hard drive connects via firewire and im not quite sure of the format. Can you recommend one to purchase that works very well with Mac's or certain features I should be buying for over others?

Thanks