[preston]

i dont know if you will have any suggestions for me, but its worth a shot.

so two weeks ago my computer wouldnt start. i took it to the apple store, they reinstalled osx, great, it works. now it wont shut down correctly. everything on my desktop dissapears, and the screen turns blue. (i can still see my wallpaper tho, its just...bluer)

i keep most of my important files on an external hard drive, so i brought it to work today to burn all of my data onto dvds. i plugged in the hard drive, and my G5 wouldnt recognize it. so i tried a different usb drive. and then tried our new iMac. still nothing. tried to restart the iMac with the drive plugged in, and it turned blue, just like my laptop. when we unplugged the drive, it shut down correctly. so im willing to bet that when i get home in an hour and try to shut down my laptop, it will work fine.

i probably have 70-80 gigs of stuff that i need. im a graphic designer, and pretty much everything i did in college is on there. i dont care so much if i lose my music, most of it is on my ipod anyway. of course i wait until today to try and back all of this sh!t up.

the hdd light flashes when it is first plugged into a computer, and then stays lit. it usually flashes like crazy when it's on. i heard the fan for a short while, but thats probably because i had plugged and unplugged it into so many computers. something inside is working, because when i touch it i can feel a small vibration. no clicking noises. i didnt drop it, abuse it in any way, it wasnt mounted on my desktop when i unplugged it this morning. the only think that i can think of that would have affected this at all is mactheripper. i used it for a few discs, and then it started freezing in the middle of all of them. i have since deleted it off of my laptop.

i have a powerbook 15" ti, and a iomega 120g external hard drive.

any suggestions would be much appreciated. i dont care if the hard drive is shot, i just need all of my stuff.

[turtle]

What does Disk Utility tell you?

I've had a similar issue and it was a b-tree node issue that Disk Warrior fixed for me. DW isn't free though.

[preston]

nada. it doesnt show up.

what is a b-tree node?

[turtle]

Originally Posted by preston nada. it doesnt show up. what is a b-tree node?

If you can't see it in Disk Utility then I don't think DW will be able to do anything for you. As for B-Tree, it's the file structure for Mac. Apple's Tech details for your reading pleasure.

[Ebby]

The Blue desktop thing is your computer hanging in the process of stopping apps or finishing tasks. It is supposed to fade completely blue before shutting down. Nonetheless, it is recommended you wait a good 3-4 minutes before forcing a shutdown and only if the drives are idle.

My guess is that your computer was updating the journaling of your drive when you forced it off and there is now a disk error. Disk Utility is probably your first alternative but the drive has to be detected before you can start anything. It it is USB, make sure the drive is getting plenty of power, as sometimes they will fib to you and spin up but not function. If the drive is completely unresponsive, there are still procedures like making it an internal drive to try and fix it.

The freezing is also a concern. This could be a Motherboard problem, a temperature issue, or a drive failing. I can't quite narrow it down yet but Mactheripper has certainly not caused these problems. If anything, it caused normal stress on your machine revealing existing problems.

[rob05au]

Which revision iMac G5 doi you have?

I will be able to help more with that info.

[preston]

thank you for your ideas & suggestions.

i downloaded a few programs to see if my data was still there, and they all froze after a few minutes, which led me to believe that the drive was dead and I lost everything.

i brought it to best buy (mistake) to see if they could give me an estimate, and they told me it was $100 bucks just to look at it, even if they couldnt do anything. so i took it and ran away.

frustrated, i gave it to my roommate to look at. not even two minutes later, he came into my room asking what the problem was. everything showed up FINE on his dell laptop. we're in the process of burning everything onto dvd's so we can reformat the drive.

so, new question. why would the drive not mount on any of the three macs i plugged it into? and why wouldn't any of the data recovery programs see anything? is this a sign that the drive is on it's way out?

[turtle]

I can't really answer that one for you, though I'm looking forward to some others with more experience to let me know. Was this always in NTFS format?

[preston]

No, it's only ever been on a Mac. I didnt futz with the settings or anything...just one day it decided to not work with my laptop anymore.

[turtle]

Odd, well at least you can get your stuff back.

[scrouds]

Originally Posted by turtle2472 I can't really answer that one for you, though I'm looking forward to some others with more experience to let me know. Was this always in NTFS format?

If its a stock USB hard drive, chances are it came pre-formated. And since it was read by the windows, and previously read and written to by the mac, I'd say its in FAT32.

DId you ever format the drive yourself? Or did you plug it in, it worked, and used it that way?