HD full, now won`t boot!

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dutchbmx

Registered
I knew I was running low on memory on my Powerbook G4 12-inch and when I saved one last file, a 500MB quicktime video, the OS went unstable and I was forced to reboot. It has not booted back into the OS since. Is there any way to delete some files off of the hard drive using the terminal? Please say there is. I have an innumerable amount of invaluable data on this machine, and I will do whatever it takes to get it back. Please remind your listeners to back up everything that is precious and irreplaceable: reports, documents; and more importantly: photos, music and downloaded email. Please also ask your listeners if there is anything that can be done. I have already tried Disk Utility, Disk Warrior, resetting the PRAM, using target disk mode on another Mac, reinstalling the OS (the installer cannot recognize the harddrive as a legitimate destination to install), and nothing works. I can, however, get into the Terminal, which is my only hope at the moment.

I could probably send the drive to a recovery service, but will this void the AppleCare warranty? It is still covered under the 3 year warranty until June 2007. I don`t want to send it to Apple because they won`t send me the hardrive back. I went ahead and ordered a MacBookPro, because I was going to need a new computer (although I am ambivalent about buying the first release of anything electronic).

Please, please email me with whatever help you can give me, or get from your listeners! I can`t regularly check the forums at the moment because I have no computer! Thanks a lot.

Nick Cohen-Meyer
dutchbmx@aol.com
Podcaster of `Invention Adventures,` which will not be updated for quite a while now.
 
Any time the free space on a drive formatted Mac OS Extended falls below 15% the probability of possibly irreparable file system damage increases dramatically. In your case not even DiskWarrior or TechTool Pro can help because even if they were able to repair the volume structure, there would not be sufficient room on the drive to write the repaired directory.

There are a couple of utilities that may be able to recover the files from the drive, such as ProSoftEngineering's Data Rescue, but you will have to have another drive to recover them to and a bootable system. If you had another Mac with enough drive space to hold the files from your crashed system you would connect the two machines with a firewire cable then boot your PowerBook into firewire target disk mode by holding down the T key during boot. At that point you can run the recovery software on the other computer against the drive in the PowerBook. After that erase the HD in your PowerBook reinstall OS X and start over again. Best of all Data Rescue has a try before you buy deal so you can see if it is going to work before paying $100 for it.

Drivesavers begins by removing the platters from your hard drive which permanently destroys the drive. That probably would not effect the warranty on the rest of the PowerBook but I would check with AppleCare before making any decisions. Oh yes one other thing their charges for recovery can easily climb into the four figure range.
 
Thank you Professor and Frozendice for your timely and insightful responses. I am trying Professor`s suggestion and will let you know of any success. Thanks again! I never would have thought of using DataRescue.
 
In the case that there simply is too much data on the drive, you can startup into Single User Mode (hold down the "Apple" key and the "S" key after the startup chime, and keep holding them down until you are taken to a Terminal-like looking interface, which is UNIX).

You can fairly easily delete files and folders from there - if you are comfortable and not too shy to use UNIX commands.

I once was forced to do the same thing, knew nothing at all about UNIX, but some research on Yahoo! and Google brought up some *very useful* tutorials that showed me how to do certain things, and I managed (within about 20 minutes of research & reading) to delete a huge folder I did no longer need - and while it would not do so before, my iBook once again started up & worked without any problem! :)

BTW: to get out from the UNIX interface, simply enter "exit" (without the quotation marks) and hit the return key on your keyboard - this will take you to your login screen.

Hope this helps.

patrice
http://www.patriceschneider.com/apple-osx/blog/
 
I started deleting files in terminal and I have freed up some space. But since I still have access to the files on my hard drive, I`d like to back them up before Murphy`s Law catches up to me. How can I copy files from my hard drive to an external firewire drive using the terminal? Please keep in mind that I have absolutely no access to the main OS, so I will need to mount everything using the Terminal. Is this possible? Can somebody please tell me, or point me in the direction of how, to do this?

Thanks in advance!

Nick Cohen-Meyer.
 
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