Help!! OSX hard drive problem on a G3 Powerbook

H

herman

Registered
Hi,

I have an 18G G3 Powerbook running OSX 10.2.8. The drive was nearly full (only 200 MB free). I was in the process of off loading some files to an USB External HD (Firelite 40 GB). I was running the Backup Express software that came on the Firelite drive (for Mac) when it completed and prompted me to reboot. After the laptop booted up, it went from the "Apple" to a "Circle with a line through it" and just hangs there. Restarted several times and still get the same result.

Can you offer any advice on how to get the laptop up, so I can remove some files to free up some hard drive space?

Thanks!!
 
The Mac OS Extended format (HFS+) always needs to have roughly 10% to 20% of the total drive space free. When HFS+ drives get too full (under 10% free space), then they are highly succeptible to data corruption. 200MB free on an 18GB drive is roughly 1% free space -- obviously, way under the recommended ~15%. More than likely, this is why your drive will not boot anymore -- something got corrupted.

How exactly to get to the drive may be kinda difficult -- taking the drive out of the PowerBook and placing it in an enclosure and using it with a different macintosh to extract the data is definitely an option.

Does the computer let you use any boot-time key combos, like booting into Single-User mode with Command-S? If you could get into single-user mode, you may be able to clear up some space, check the drive for errors, then resume backing up...
 
You could take some files off it using target disk mode - press apple-t at startup, then connect the mac to another mac via firewire. You could also run disk repair on it this way.
 
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