external HD problem- constantly giving me grey screen

[carmine615]

i recently installed 10.4 on my emac. i have 1gb of ram and 1ghz, more than sufficient for me and the computers uses...

the installation for 10.4 went without a hitch, however as i booted up after the installation restart, in the grey screen with the apple and looping 'loading' ball, it froze with the grey screen.

i began to panic cuz hell, i just installed a new OS and if all my stuff is gone that'd make me a touch uneasy

well anyway, i was curious and after the 4th or 5th restart with no luck, i unplugged my external hd- it's a maxtor 160GB- full with about 126GB of data on it. now i know not to plug it in while the computer is fully booted or else you'll get the grey screen too, but what gives? everytime i boot with the external hd plugged in and on, i get the grey screen.

could anyone shed some light on how i could fix this? i have a lot of very important information on the hard drive and the sooner i could access it, the better


thanks,
carmine

 

[carmine615]

A few months passed since I first posted and I still have the same problem, I could really really use some help here. G4 eMac, 1 gig SDRAM running osx 10.4.11. I'll describe my problem again-

As soon as I upgraded to 10.4, my external Maxtor 160gig firewire hard drive, when plugged in freezes my computer. If my computer is off and I turn my external on, and THEN start my computer, I make it to the white screen with the silver apple and the loading "ball" and it freezes there. If after that I restart with the external off, I make it to my desktop- However, if I attempt to turn my external back on while fully booted up, it freezes and brings me to the grey screen of death.

Can anyone help me make my hard drive work right? I have extremely, EXTREMELY, important school documents on my external and need them off.. I could really really use help, anyone

 

[quadra800]

Buy a new cabinet for the hard disk. That might be the easiest and safest solution.

 

[carmine615]

By cabinet you mean take my hard drive disk out of the case and put it in a different one..? Isn't there anything software related I could do? I don't have the money for a new hard drive, unless cases are cheap which I hope are if theres nothing software related I can do..

 

[teapot]

Hi Carmine
Do you have an operating system on your external drive? If not have you tried to boot with the external drive disconnected then repairing permissions on your internal drive having gone through this process restart your computer then connect your firewire external drive. This may or may not work, it is just the type of process I try because my dad always told me "all problems are simple until proved otherwise.