I can no longer access the hard drive on an eMac, with 10.3.3 installed. It will not boot by itself (gives the blinking folder/question mark).
I can and will reinstall the system on this machine, but it has some critical data that is not backed up that I would very much like to recover if there is any way to do so -- and I'm willing to try just about anything. Here is the current state of the machine: It will boot from the Restore and Install CD, but the neither the Install program nor Disk Utility can find a volume on the internal hard drive. Disk Utility does find the physical hard drive. Apple Hardware Test gives an "Error Detected" message when testing Mass Storage. The error code is "2STF/2/3: MAC-10 ata-4 ? Master" Disk Warrior (3.0.2) also finds the hard drive, but not a volume. Running its test gives the message "This hard drive does not have built-in S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics." It can go no further because it does not find any directories to rebuild. I have called Alsoft tech support, who confirms that D.W. can't do anything unless it can find a volume. Their best guess is that the partition map is munged. I have called Apple tech support, who says all I can do is reinstall the system. They gave me the name of a data recovery company. I seem to recall that under similar circumstances on machines running OS 9 I was able to recover some data files using Norton's recovery utilities. I could, for instance, specify certain filetypes, and tell Norton to find all files of that type. Usually, some of them were recoverable. I do not have Norton's for OS X, nor do I know if it has that capability. I am also wondering if there is any way to boot into Terminal or some kind of command line that would let me type in some magical Unix gobbledygook that would cure everything -- or at least let me recover a few data files? I eagerly, and anxiously, await any and all responses. Dan | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be May 25. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | List posting address: <mailto:macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu> | List Web page: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>
