HD partition won't mount

[~obey]

I have a G4 that has two harddrives. The first one is a factory installed 10GB HD. The second one is an aftermarket 80GB drive with two partitions that I installed and formatted. The second harddrive (80GB, that has my OS on it, 10.2.8) won't start up. I finally got the computer to start up using an old OS9 startup disk. For whatever reason, the second HD won't recognize both partitions and wants me to reformat the 2nd partition (the one with my OS on it, all my files, applications). I don't want to reformat that partition because I'll lose all my files.

Any ideas/suggestions? I did reinstall OS9 back on to my smaller 10GB hard drive so i could atleast get the computer to start up...but the second partition is still not coming up and the computer is asking me to reformat that partition.

Thanks for any input.

 

[Viro]

Is this a new occurrence? What I mean by that is was the machine working before or did you just transfer the hard drive from another computer?

OS 9 may not recognize the other partition because it's formated for HFS+ with journalling and hence it is trying to reformat your hard drive.

 

[~obey]

this happened on friday night. the previous night i was on the computer and everything worked fine. i've had this setup for over two years (although the computer is close to 5+ years old). nothing new has happened within the past two months. i mean...i've used the computer and done some client stuff, but nothing new hardware or software wise. the last thing i did to it was add 128mb of ram to it two months ago.

would upgrading from OS 9 to X help the drive become recognized? what if i ran TechTools on it? My main goal is to recover all that data. I don't mind reformatting the drive clean, but i need to get my stuff off first.