Tiger updates have broke my mac!

F

feel

Registered
Hi people,
I've kind of had an extreme catastrophe and i'm hoping that someone out there can help.

Basically i was installing the updates for my mac last night and as it was downloading the new patch for Tiger it crashed and said that there had been an error and i would have to restart, but don't worry as that it would move something to to thrash which i could then reopen to carry on the download.

Anyway when i restarted the Loading OSX screen gets to about half way and then the screen goes blue with the thinking circle thing (not the rainbow colour the other one), appears, and this is when it stops.

Somebody told me that if you hold Shift when you load it should I run in safe mode but if i do that it just turns itself off after a while.

I also went and put my old 10.1 OSX disks in there to re-install but it said that it could not find my Hard drive.

I know its stupid but i haven't backed up my computer for ages and i stand to loose all my work, photos, music, and videos if i can't fix this. The work is the worst 'cause i am currently in my final year at uni so this really could mess me up.

ANY help would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks,
Phil
 
Your data is the most important item on the mac you have. You can always replace the Mac but not your data.

Suggest that you get an engineer to pull the data off of the hard disk (if possible) onto a DVD.

However if you have Tiger DVD you could try booting off that and running Disk First Aid.

R.
 
I think you're right i might have to do that, thanks. I've left my tiger disks at home but i have the origninal OSX 10.1 disks but the first aid on there didn't really do anything.

I've been playing around in Single-user mode but that has just made me more deppressed. It told me to type
/sbin/fsck -fy

to check and repair my hard drive and then it will return one of two things, either:
**The volume (name _ofvolume) appears to be OK

or
***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

thing is though i'm getting:
Invaild node structure
(4, 1624)
** Rebuliding Catalog B-tree.
disk0s5: I/O error
** the Volume Machintosh HD could not be repaired.


Does this mean i'm screwed?
 
I suggest booting up with the Tiger install CDs and run Disk Utility from the menu once you are greeted with the Welcome screen for the installation.

If Disk Utility shows the drive, I suggest running a Repair Disk on it.

The other option is to do an Archive and Install installation, which would still keep your data but create a whole new System folder for the operating system. This way, you can recover your data if the installation disc can see the hard drive to perform the archive installation.

Good luck!
 
Another option (and I don't know if this will work, but it's worth a try), is to try and boot from a Linux distro Live CD to extract the data and move it off to another location. I have done this on the x86 side in order to recover fubared Windows systems, but I haven't yet tried it on the Macs. Ubuntu has a live CD that might be of help. You might have to modprobe the module for hfs and hfsplus before you mount the partition.
 
Following on from this, is it possible to create a bootable DVD with a minimal system install of Tiger, say, enough to access utilities, in the same way as I used to have a DOS Boot disk with tools like scandisk on it...?

If this reply should be a new thread or moved elsewhere, please feel free to edit/move.
 
From that error it sounds like you're disk's file system is corrupt. Disk Utility isn't that good at actually fixing the disk but DiskWarrior is a lot better.
 
Thanks for your help everyone. I think i'm either going to get hold of Disk Warrior or just link up to another mac with a firewire cable to copy my stuff accross and then just reinstall.

Thanks again guys
 
My PB G4 12" will not start up past the Mac logo screen (I get a chime and the spinning wheel, until that stops after 10 seconds, and the computer freezes). Right now I'm trying fsck -y, but it returns this:
The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired.
Any help/suggestions?
 
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