Yesterday I was running carbon copy cloner to back up my hard drive to my firewire. I keep the firewire drive bootable in case the worst happens.
Apparently it did. The system totally locked up (normal back-up takes less than an hour and after four hours it was still struggling and making no progress) and had to do a hard reboot. When the sytem came back up OS X wouldn't start. Just a black screen and occasion disk I/O error messages.
Restarted again holding down the option key. Booted off the firewire drive and the back-up had finished for my son's account but not my account. I ran the TechTools program that came with AppleCare and updated it to the most current version. Then I checked the internal drive TT showed errors and wanted to repair. I held off repairing and manually moved over the handful of iTunes purchases that hadn't backed-up to the firewire drive. Then logged out and restarted using the OS X install disk to run the hardware diagnostic. It confirmed errors on the internal drive.
I booted again off the firewire drive, pulled some missing photos off the internal drive but iPhoto said four of them were unreadable, moved over my mail mailboxes that hadn't been updated and ran TT again and again it found errors and wanted to do some pretty nasty repairs that would reduce the size of the drive. I went ahead and ran it figuring that if that worked I could try reformatting the internal drive and if it passed verification I could just clone the external drive over and keep on going.
So I gave it permission and nothing seemed to happen. So I went on the net to check for similar problems and suddenly the screen grayed out and in the gray out a dark but transparent box appeared and said I had to power down immediately by using the power button. So I complied.
Now when I try to boot off the external drive it takes a loooong time to get the blue bar to go all the way across to start OS X once it gets there the box doesn't close but the log-in box pops up and does not have any users. I enter my username and password and the lollipop spins then the box shakes. I've tried logging in as other users and still same story.
So I booted off the OS X install disk again and ran disk utility. Shows the external drive is fine but needs to repair permissions. I let it repair a bundle of them. Start again and same long attempt to start OS X, same lack of user information, same failure to recognize users and passwords.
After running the repair with techtools, the system no longer believes the internal drive exists.
Boot again off the install disk and try to reset passwords and it shows no users at all on the external drive.
Obviously the internal drive is hosed. Don't have the error code in front of me but had looked it up and basically the answer was it is dead. I'm under AppleCare and will be taking it in for a replacement drive.
Have I lost my back-up as well? Any ideas why all this going on? Any ideas on how to fix the log in issues for the external until I can get in for the repair?
iMac G5 2ghz 20 Mac OS X (10.4.8)
Apparently it did. The system totally locked up (normal back-up takes less than an hour and after four hours it was still struggling and making no progress) and had to do a hard reboot. When the sytem came back up OS X wouldn't start. Just a black screen and occasion disk I/O error messages.
Restarted again holding down the option key. Booted off the firewire drive and the back-up had finished for my son's account but not my account. I ran the TechTools program that came with AppleCare and updated it to the most current version. Then I checked the internal drive TT showed errors and wanted to repair. I held off repairing and manually moved over the handful of iTunes purchases that hadn't backed-up to the firewire drive. Then logged out and restarted using the OS X install disk to run the hardware diagnostic. It confirmed errors on the internal drive.
I booted again off the firewire drive, pulled some missing photos off the internal drive but iPhoto said four of them were unreadable, moved over my mail mailboxes that hadn't been updated and ran TT again and again it found errors and wanted to do some pretty nasty repairs that would reduce the size of the drive. I went ahead and ran it figuring that if that worked I could try reformatting the internal drive and if it passed verification I could just clone the external drive over and keep on going.
So I gave it permission and nothing seemed to happen. So I went on the net to check for similar problems and suddenly the screen grayed out and in the gray out a dark but transparent box appeared and said I had to power down immediately by using the power button. So I complied.
Now when I try to boot off the external drive it takes a loooong time to get the blue bar to go all the way across to start OS X once it gets there the box doesn't close but the log-in box pops up and does not have any users. I enter my username and password and the lollipop spins then the box shakes. I've tried logging in as other users and still same story.
So I booted off the OS X install disk again and ran disk utility. Shows the external drive is fine but needs to repair permissions. I let it repair a bundle of them. Start again and same long attempt to start OS X, same lack of user information, same failure to recognize users and passwords.
After running the repair with techtools, the system no longer believes the internal drive exists.
Boot again off the install disk and try to reset passwords and it shows no users at all on the external drive.
Obviously the internal drive is hosed. Don't have the error code in front of me but had looked it up and basically the answer was it is dead. I'm under AppleCare and will be taking it in for a replacement drive.
Have I lost my back-up as well? Any ideas why all this going on? Any ideas on how to fix the log in issues for the external until I can get in for the repair?
iMac G5 2ghz 20 Mac OS X (10.4.8)