johnsalomon
Registered
Hi there,
My hard drive (60GB) recently crashed on my ca. 3-year-old 12" G4 (Leopard). I run S.M.A.R.T. reporter, and it marked the drive as healthy until I rebooted my machine last and got the flashing question mark. 2 days before my monthly backup and after a fairly intense amount of copying work-related files. Murphy lives.
Rebooting with the install DVD and running disk utility showed the drive each time, but only showed the partition on it once. I tried running both 'verify' and 'repair' on the partition; verify failed, and repair froze. I then tried mounting the partition manually from terminal, without success.
I then figured it was a partition table problem; I've manually re-created partitions on various unix boxes in the past by setting the correct size/geometry, but am not that familiar with HFS+; since there was a 'format' option and something resembling 'create new partition' (without the format) I assumed that might do it; unfortunately, it started formatting the drive so I killed it.
I tried rebooting with the DVD again a few times; when the partition finally showed up again, it was empty. I am pretty sure my drive is physically dead or dying, but I am willing to hook it up to an external enclosure and to try a few times to get another machine to recognize it, to see if I can get any data off it.
My questions are as follows:
- Is there a way to re-build just an HFS+ partition table on an external drive (i.e. without formatting)?
- IF I can access the drive/partition, does it matter that I had filevault on it?
Thanks so much for any help, would love to avoid paying a grand to Kroll for forensic work...
My hard drive (60GB) recently crashed on my ca. 3-year-old 12" G4 (Leopard). I run S.M.A.R.T. reporter, and it marked the drive as healthy until I rebooted my machine last and got the flashing question mark. 2 days before my monthly backup and after a fairly intense amount of copying work-related files. Murphy lives.
Rebooting with the install DVD and running disk utility showed the drive each time, but only showed the partition on it once. I tried running both 'verify' and 'repair' on the partition; verify failed, and repair froze. I then tried mounting the partition manually from terminal, without success.
I then figured it was a partition table problem; I've manually re-created partitions on various unix boxes in the past by setting the correct size/geometry, but am not that familiar with HFS+; since there was a 'format' option and something resembling 'create new partition' (without the format) I assumed that might do it; unfortunately, it started formatting the drive so I killed it.
I tried rebooting with the DVD again a few times; when the partition finally showed up again, it was empty. I am pretty sure my drive is physically dead or dying, but I am willing to hook it up to an external enclosure and to try a few times to get another machine to recognize it, to see if I can get any data off it.
My questions are as follows:
- Is there a way to re-build just an HFS+ partition table on an external drive (i.e. without formatting)?
- IF I can access the drive/partition, does it matter that I had filevault on it?
Thanks so much for any help, would love to avoid paying a grand to Kroll for forensic work...
