Mounting external Firewire HDD

roger

Registered
Does anyone know how to mount an external firewire HDD? And just to throw another complication in, how do you mount it in single user mode?

The reason is that my iBook has seriously crashed and will not boot up into any OS now. I can view all directories in Single User mode, except the system directory. I have tried Norton Utilities, but it cannot fix it. I am going to re-initialise the partition, but before then I would like to get a lot of files off my machine. My original plan was to start in Target mode, but I am having problems obtaining a 6pin-6pin firewire cable. However I have a external firewire drive so if I can link it up in single user mode I should be fine. The only problem here is - I don't know how.

Many thanks in advance for any help.

Roger.
 
I have two OSX machines setup each with their own external 60GB harddrives. I formatted one of the harddrives to be mountable with Anubis Pro and the other one just with the Apple driver.

The one formatted with the Apple driver will not boot up no matter what through it mounts fine. Not even if there is no system folder on the internal drive. Use the advice from the previous post using OS 9 to start up.

The one formatted as bootable with Anubis works perfectly in that scenario. I suggest you make the external drive bootable and then you have a safe backup for problems like you described.
Hope this helps.

G
 
That is another good idea.

Well, things didn't really go according to plan last night. I booted up from the 9.2 CD and I got an error saying that my internal HDD would not mount. I tried fixing it using a variety of tools and it became apparent that the B-Tree was corrupt. I could not start in single user mode because the HDD was not mounting either.

In the end I bit the bullet and re-initiallised the partitions using OSX disk utility. I created 3: one to install OS9.2, one for OSX and a data one. I tried installing OSX initially but it would not get past checking the HDD. I rebooted from Norton Utilities and checked out the media on the partition and it came back that the media was damaged, which was the initial problem that I was getting. I assumed at this point there was physical damage to part of the disk. However I thought that I may as well install 9.2 on the other partition, which I did. I then used Norton to check all the disks, and lo and behold, the problem seemed to have disapeared. I installed OSX with no problem and cannot detect any more errors on any of my Partitions.

I had backed up all my critical data anyway, but I was keen to get a lot of MP3 that I hadn't backed up, just to save me ripping them again.

So, I am back up and running, and installing OS9.2 on one partition seemed to do the trick on another partition. I don't know why/how this could have happened, or if it is coincidence.

TestUser - thanks for your help.

Roger.
 
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