MAC Powerbook G4...Hard Drive Crashed!

THE TOUCH · October 10, 2006

Well...after 6 years of faithful & reliable of service, my Mac finally crashed. :cry

I was in Starbuck's several weeks ago and I was talking to a guy with a new MacBook Pro. He said that he just replaced his PB because one of the hinges broke. All I could think about was when my would break too! Sure enough...a couple weeks later...mine broke.

I thought I could get by with a broken hinge, but 1 week later I was working on my PB and it made a couple of popping sounds. Since my PB has never made a noise louder than the fan itself, I knew I was in trouble. ~1 minute later, everything locked up! Since it's a Mac, this has never happened before. If it were Windows, I'd understand! :rofl Nothing would work except for the mouse. So I shut it down and tried to restart but it would not boot up.

So, Unfortunately (HEHE!), I had to rush out and get a new MacBook Pro! :clap When I tried to transfer from my old computer via firewire, I was able to get the PB into the transfer mode but the MBP said that it could not find an OSX operating system. :huh

Any ideas? Do I have any options? I did a backup the week before when my hinge broke so I only lost 1 weeks worth of data, but I would really like to get that data.

Thanks! Hope you enjoyed my sob story!

CatOne · October 11, 2006

If the hard drive crashed, you're probably SOL with the migration assistant. That's because the assistant requires a working hard drive on the source machine that's connected via target disk mode.

6 years is *really* pushing it for a laptop HD... whoa ;-)

SpeshulEd · October 11, 2006

At first I was going to jump in this thread and jokingly say "haha, your MAC crashed," then I read it was the first time in 6 years...coming from a lifelong pc user, well, thats just crazy talk.

I know there are hdd recovery programs for the pc, so I'd imagine there are some out there for the mac as well, but I'm not familiar with any of them. I've used hdd regenerator for the pc before with success, but am not sure if its available for mac or not.

Good luck to you with this. I wish I had more knowledge with mac's, but everytime I try to use one, it just takes 10x longer to what I could have did in a couple of minutes on a pc.

colourbox · October 11, 2006

THE TOUCH wrote:

Any ideas? Do I have any options? I did a backup the week before when my hinge broke so I only lost 1 weeks worth of data, but I would really like to get that data.

Some ideas:

When you've got the old PowerBook in Target Disk Mode connected to your MacBook Pro, it's as if you have it connected as an external hard disk, so if you have any disk utilities on your MacBook Pro you should try running them on the PowerBook.

If you are talking about the Titanium PowerBook, the hard drive is right under the keyboard, right? You could try taking it out, putting it in a case, and diagnosing it from there. But if target disk mode can't read it, putting it in a case may not help much more.

If the drive has a serious hardware problem, there probably isn't anything you can do on your own. If you must have the data it is probably time for a data-recovery service, the kind that can take apart the drive. But the data has to have enough monetary value for the high fee to be worth it. (Or, you just have to be so wealthy that it's not a big deal.)

THE TOUCH · October 12, 2006

Thanks for the replies everyone!

colourbox - Sounds possible with the disk utility! I'll give it a shot and see what happens.

Thanks again!

chrisjlee · October 19, 2006

SpeshulEd wrote:

At first I was going to jump in this thread and jokingly say "haha, your MAC crashed,"

Me too. Touch luck.

MAC Powerbook G4...Hard Drive Crashed!

Comments