where's my hard drive gone??

[aliberry]

please can you tell me what to do - I have 'lost' one of my two drives, the one with loads of applications on! It was there a couple of days go... I just noticed it has disappeared off the desk top. It does not appear in the 'spotlight' search or in the remaining drive, all the aliases for applications just have question marks on, in the dock... I even checked the trash in case I'd accidentally dragged it there. Loads of stuff in it that I have dumped recently but no drive. I wont empty the trash till I've heard from you.

The only thing I can think of is that this morning I went 'broadband' using an aol auto-install disk. can this have somehow destroyed my drive?

I have a G4 using Mac OS x 10.4.10.
My partner loaded most of the applications before he took our other G4 to france so I dont have the application disks. I have Norton drive doctor but partner used to do all the techy stuff, I dont know where to start....?
hope you can help
Alison

[Satcomer]

NEVER EVER use Norton on an OS X disk AT ALL!!!!! They dropped OS X because their products messed up OS X so badly in the past they were sued. So they stopped making disk utilties for Macs a couple of OS X versions ago.

The drive is external or internal?

[Hughvane]

Originally Posted by aliberry

please can you tell me what to do - I have a G4 using Mac OS x 10.4.10.

1. Go to and open Disk Utility, which will be in Applications or Utilities folder. See if DU lists your 'missing' drive. If it does, then click on the Name of the drive. Now you have two choices:
2. First Aid
3. Repair Disk Permissions

If nothing of the above helps, then you probably need to do some hardware repairs and for that you need the original installation disks. You can start your computer from Disk 1 by holding down the C key on startup. From that No 1 disk you can effect repairs.

If that fails, take your computer to a repair technician, but wait to see what other contributors have to advise.