Broken video card/hard drive backup/no monitor

I have a broken video card. How do I back up the harddrive if my screen is unreadable?

Do you have access to another Mac? If so, you might be able to use FireWire Target Disk Mode to mount your hard drive on the other Mac:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661
You won't be able to see the FireWire symbol on the Mac with the non-working video, but you should be able to see the drive mount on the desktop of the other Mac. Once it's there, you will be able to access its contents and do your backup.
Also, check to see if your Mac falls under this program:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377
If it does, the repair will be done at no cost to you.
Good luck!

Similar Messages

Upgrading Power Mac G5 Dual 2.0 Ram/Video Card/Hard Drives

Hi there,
Ok so I am an avid Mac user, but have neglected one of my machines lately. This old Power Mac G5 just pushed the 3 year mark and I had a bunch of repairs done to it (New Logic Board, Hard Drive, Power Supply) before the Apple Care ran out. I used to do all of my editing and stuff on it but haven't had time this past year so it has just sat here and not gotten any use. I felt as if it was time to get back in the game so I picked up another Apple 20" monitor, some M-Audio studio monitors, a 11" Wacom, but feel the machine is too outdated to do anything.
Ok first off, I am looking to upgrade from the four 256 sticks (1GB) that I have in my computer with some 2 2GB kits (1GB x 2) (4GB total) and have been looking at the ram that Crucial suggests for this machine (8 Slots). Is there anything that I should look for in ram that will help me get through all of my 3D motion design faster (HD Final Cut too). I don't know a lot about ram when it comes to buffers and such, just how to buy compatible ram. Any suggestions?
Second I am looking to upgrade my video card. I currently have the GeForce FX 5200 with 64 MB of VRAM, which is completely unacceptable. I am looking for a card that can handle all of my motion work along with rendering in Final Cut, something with 256MB of VRAM or more.. I want something that has 2 DVI connections so I don't need an adapter like I currently do with this card to hook up both Apple displays. Suggestions?
Lastly I am looking to up my storage space on this beast. I currently have a brand new 160GB main HDD (Courtesy Apple Care) and a 250GB Maxtor internally. I would really like to have at least a TB of storage. My question is wether I should just keep the 160 for the main boot up drive and apps along with minimum documents to keep the speeds faster, and get a 500 internal and 500 exclosure, or get two 500's for internal?

Hi-
With RAM, fancy isn't necessary, compatible is. Buffers aren't supported, so stick with the recommended memory. Memory should be 184-pin DDR SDRAM DIMMs that are 2.5 volt, unbuffered, 8-byte, nonparity, and DDR400-compliant (PC3200).
Important: DIMMs with any of the following features are not supported in the Power Mac G5 computer: registers or buffers, PLLs, ECC, parity, or EDO RAM.
For two DVI outputs, and the power to run your software, the only choices are the Geforce 6800GT and the Geforce 6800 Ultra. For a bit less money, but requires an ADC to DVI adapter for second DVI, the Radeon X800XT will help with the softwares needs. These benchmarks will help you see the performance of the cards.
For storage, the 160gb will work for OS and applications, but you might as well add two 500gb-750gb drives. The new, enterprise drives have great performance, and though larger, will most probably work faster as a startup drive than the 160gb drive. These benchmarks are from a Mac Pro test, but the results illustrate the speed of the larger drives.
The Western Digital SE16 series, or the Seagate ES series offer excellent performance and reliability. See Storage Reviews. For a 1tb drive, see this article.
Of course, whatever you install, add enough external for full backup capabilities.

I want to Connect my Mac Mini as a Slave to a Mac pro Server while at the same time using the Mac mini's thunderbolt ports peripherals ( ie monitor, Sound Card, Hard drives) Creating a poor man's new mac Pro. Can this be Done?

I want to Connect my Mac Mini as a Slave to a Mac pro Server while at the same time using the Mac mini's thunderbolt ports peripherals ( ie monitor, Sound Card, Hard drives) Creating a poor man's new mac Pro. Can this be Done?

Well, I really would love the new unreleased mac pro however , I'm not sure of the expected cost , Everyone speculates from $3,000 to $8,000, in which I may have to wait a while to purchase.
To the point .... I want fully functional thunderbolt ports to be on the current mac pro's .... wonder if anyone had workarounds yet?... or could I chain the the current mac pro to a mac mini to make that happen?

I have a macbook pro with a broken video card. How do ensure that my data is completely erased before I sell it ?

I have a macbook pro with a broken video card. How do ensure that my data is completely erased before I sell it ? Thanks

1. Connect it to a monitor.
2. Replace the hard drive.

Hard Drive Backup Utility - Question

I have a P67A-GD55 and everything is working wonderfully. I would like more information concerning the Hard Disk Drive Backup Utility in the BIOS. The BIOS Version is 1.9 and that came on the board from the time of purchase.
I can get to the HARD DRIVE BACKUP option in BIOS and it seems like it times out waiting for something...which I have yet to figure out.
My intention is to do a complete backup to an another drive LETTER: which is currently the identical sized partition on the same physical drive. I was able to use CLONEZILLA x64 but would prefer to use the built in Utility.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
My System;
MSI P67A-GD55 B3 Stepping (Bios version 1.9)
I7 2600K
G.SKILL 8Gb DDR3 1600 F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL
MSI N5500GTX-Ti Video card
Hitachi 2Tb 7200 6Gb SATA Hardrive
Win 7 Home Prem x64

i dont recommend windows backup utility, not comprehensive enough.
if u are a home user, there are many free utilities out there.
drive backup, true image and todo backup are all good backup tools.
they are all can help you.
personally, i use todo backup.
http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm

Restore from external hard drive backup

How do I restore from an external hard drive backup of my old system. How do you import into iTunes 8?

Hello,
Sorry to tap into this thread but it was the only one that made sense.
I have been trying to restore my kid's libraries from an external HD. I assumed I needed to be logged into their Windows profile to launch each of their own itunes applications. As I tried to launch with the Shift key held down, I got the appropriate request about choosing a library. But when I navigated to the HD and found their .itl file, it said it was locked or I had inadequate permissions and would not proceed.
I then logged in as myself (admin) & then dragged & dropped the files into their respective folders. When I went back to open itunes, the songlist was where it should be but nothing played when I tried them.
Is this where "consolodating" comes in and what is it and how do you do it?
Thanks for your patience.

How do I put aperture in the "vault" on my WD Smartware external hard drive backup?

How do I put aperture in the "vault" on my WD Smartware external hard drive backup?

How do I put aperture in the "vault" on my WD Smartware external hard drive backup?

Backing up .mdf's and .ldf's using hard drive backup utility deleting SQL Server backup devices...

I am a software developer using Windows 8.1, Visual Studio 2013, and SQL Server 2014. I have a number (30+) of SQL Server databases that I use in my development and support activities.
Every time I run a backup (full or incremental) all of the backup devices in my instance of SQL Server 2014 are being deleted. I can add them all back in (a time-consuming and irritating process after about the 5th time), and the very next time I run either
the Acronis Backup and Paragon Hard Drive Backup against the volume (D:) that contains all of the .mdf and .ldf files, all of the backup devices are again deleted.
I hope someone can give me some idea of how to get around this problem or how to eliminate it completely. Should I not be using these types of backup utilities to copy the .mdf's and .ldf's? I've just never seen backup devices be deleted from SQL
Server. I have dumped the contents of the backup devices data within SQL Server and the rows are definitely gone after the either of the backups run.
Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this problem. It is very time-consuming and seems pretty silly to me -- but it's happening nonetheless.

The last backup location you use is never stored in sys.backup_devices. That's an instance-wide table for registering shared backup locations, mosly for tape backups in the old days.
Per-database backup history is stored in msdb, and AFAIK the database backup dialog in SSMS is pre-populated with a location from msdb. It looks like it runs this query
exec sp_executesql N'SELECT
bkpmf.media_family_id AS [ID],
bkpmf.family_sequence_number AS [FamilySequenceNumber],
bkpmf.media_count AS [MediaCount],
bkpmf.logical_device_name AS [LogicalDeviceName],
bkpmf.physical_device_name AS [PhysicalDeviceName],
CASE WHEN bkpmf.device_type > 100 THEN bkpmf.device_type - 100 ELSE bkpmf.device_type END AS [BackupDeviceType],
CAST(CASE WHEN bkpmf.device_type > 100 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS bit) AS [IsBackupDevicePermanent],
bkpmf.physical_block_size AS [PhysicalBlockSize]
FROM
msdb.dbo.backupmediaset bkpms
INNER JOIN msdb.dbo.backupmediafamily bkpmf ON bkpmf.media_set_id=bkpms.media_set_id
WHERE
(bkpms.media_set_id=@_msparam_0)',N'@_msparam_0 nvarchar(4000)',@_msparam_0=N'3'
So it's possible that your backup software is purging that table, eg by runningmsdb.dbo.sp_delete_database_backuphistory.
Or perhaps more likely, your backup software is adding data to the SQL Server backup history that prevents SSMS from pre-populating the backup dialog with your last TSQL backup location.
In any case, you don't need to manually take the bakcups through SSMS every day. You can just save a script of your backup commands (by hitting the Script button on the backup dialog) and run that. Or create a SQL agent job to run the script
or use a database maintence plan.
David
David http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dbrowne/

User feedback please: graphics cards/hard drives

Hey there. I'm looking to upgrade my G5 quad with new hard drives and a graphics card. I'm interested in the 1 TB hitachi drives that are out. I'm also looking for a new graphics card for my 30-inch display. The main concern I have is avoiding defective products and noise, since I run a audio studio. Any feedback? Temps? Fan revolution averages? Cooling/Mod advise? Lay it on me. Thanks!

Hi,
The fastest upgrade video card for your Quad is the ATI Radeon X1900 GT Mac Edition 256MB as sold at Display section of the Apple Store. Read the Reviews there for more info.
I have four 500GB Hitachi's in my Quad, they work well.
I'm not familiar with those 1TB Hitachi HD's.
Regards,
Dave

IPhoto External Hard Drive Backup Issues

Hi All,
I'm have trouble with iPhoto on my iMac G5.
I'm running out of space on my hard drive so I want to permanently move my iphoto library over to my external Lacie hard drive. I've created a copy of the iPhoto library on the external hard drive, but it does not update automatically when I add new photos, and ultimately I want to move the entire iPhoto libray over to this drive to save space on my iMac.
Any ideas on how to do this?
Thanks in advance
Sky

Sky:
Welcome to the Apple Discussions. What you need to do is launch iPhoto with the Option key depressed and, when asked, opt to locate your library. Then navigate to the library on the external and select it.
If you have photos in your old library that you want to copy to the external library either drag the appropriate roll folder in the Originals folder into the open iPhoto window to import those files or use iPhoto Library Manager to cpy the rolls from the old library to the new one like this. This way you can retain any keywords or comments you've added to those files. When you're satisfied that your external library has all of the photos you can delete the one on your boot drive.
Do you Twango?
TIP: For insurance against the iPhoto database corruption that many users have experienced I recommend making a backup copy of the Library6.iPhoto database file and keep it current. If problems crop up where iPhoto suddenly can't see any photos or thinks there are no photos in the library, replacing the working Library6.iPhoto file with the backup will often get the library back. By keeping it current I mean backup after each import and/or any serious editing or work on books, slideshows, calendars, cards, etc. That insures that if a problem pops up and you do need to replace the database file, you'll retain all those efforts. It doesn't take long to make the backup and it's good insurance.
I've written an Automator workflow application (requires Tiger), iPhoto dB File Backup, that will copy the selected Library6.iPhoto file from your iPhoto Library folder to the Pictures folder, replacing any previous version of it. You can download it at Toad's Cellar. Be sure to read the Read Me pdf file.

How to retreive Thunderbird files from a hard drive backup due to having hard drive replaced.

My hard drive crashed but I was able to backup to external drive the day before. Dell replaced the hard drive and I did a restore from back up but I can't find the Thunderbird profile files from the back up to put into my new Thunderbird on the new hard drive. Where can I find them on the backup and how can I import them to the new application of Thunderbird?

See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb to locate your profile on the old hard drive.
Then locate your profile on the new drive.
Copy the xxxxxxxx.default from your old drive to the same folder that your new one is in; so now you have <old 8-char>.default and <new 8-char>.default in the same folder.
See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/using-multiple-profiles to switch from the new one to the old one.

How to restore iTunes library from TimeMachine external hard drive backup after clean install

I was not able to solve this problem, hence I decided to open this discussion.
1. Recently, I clean installed Yosemite so my new Mac is completely empty.
2. I have my time machine backup on my eternal hard drive and would like to restore only specific things - such as iTunes library.
3. I did not manually copy iTunes library to my drive, I did the TM backup only, but I also do have all the files in my own "music" folder I manually backed-up.
However, I cannot locate the library there, where is it?
How do I move the library to my new Mac and then establish a new source folder that would be on my drive?
PS: Previously, iTunes used my own music folder as a source = it contained all the music files. I had it on an external drive, later moved it to my Mac.
This leads me to the conclusion that my backup copy of iTunes library did not contain the files anyway.
Any advice?
Thank you in advance.

I am confused as to what you had or have where and when. The bottom line is, your library (for the standard user) is everything in the iTunes folder. As far as iTunes' organization and display is concerned, your library is a file called "iTunes Library.itl" which points to all the other host of files and folders normally in the iTunes folder which all work together.
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391
iTunes 9 [and later]: Understanding iTunes Media Organization - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3847 - plus supplemental information about organizing to new structure https://discussions.apple.com/message/26404702#26404702
Image of folder structure and explanation of different iTunes versions (turingtest2 post) - https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-7392 and making an iTunes library portable.
If you kept everything together in one place then you need to put the whole iTunes folder on the drive where you want it, start iTunes while holding down the option key and guide it to that .itl file. If things were split up and you had media on the external and the rest of the library on the internal you need to get them back to exactly where they were before. If you can't find that iTunes folder holding the critical .itl file anywhere then you have a bunch of media tracks and no organization and will need to rebuild the organization from ground level.

Internal Hard Drive Backup + External Hard Drive Backup

Hi everyone and thanks for your attention.
My question is about Backup for two different hard disk.
I've got an internal 500 gb hard disk and a 4 tb external hard disk and my computer is a Macbook pro 15 Unibody 10.6.8.
I need daily (or better hourly) back up for the internal and the external. On the internal I've got system and applications, on the external my work project folders.
My solution at the moment are two other hard disk raid mounted as backup drives. They form together 5tb back up space. I'm using time machine, so it manage my internal 500 gb disk and my external 4tb disk together.
Today I had to recover my system from Time Machine. The app is recovering the documents, but I have a doubt. Before starting recovering I had to choose the hard drive where to recover the system. I had to decide between the internal and the external, and I've chosen the internal, because the OS was installed there.
Will Time Machine put the files, that were on the internal drive, in the internal drive and the ones that were on the external on the external?
My complete back up is 2.4 tb so my 500 gb won't surely be enough.
Moreover. I'm assuming that is so much better to divide the back up. One backup system for the internal and one for the external. It seems to me that my version of Time Machine (10.6.8) does not allow to assign different back up drive for different is use drive. Eg. an external drive to use for the internal drive and another external drive for the external drive in use.
What about next Time Machine versions?
Or maybe would be better to use Time Machine for the internal drive with an external drive as back up, and the use an another application such as Carbon Copy Cloner to back up the external drive to another different external drive.
To be more clear, the solution I'd like to have is:
Internal Drive (500 gb) > time machine > External Drive (1tb)
External Drive (4tb) > Carbon Copy Cloner > External Drive (5tb)
Thanks a lot!
Nicola

The best source for those questions, Nicola, is the Pondini Tips Page, and then go to the specific sections of his website which has everything there is to know about Time Machine.

Final Cut Express moving videos off hard drive

So I started capturing some footage on my laptop because I didn't have an external drive available. I finished the project, and now I'm back home with my external drive. My internal drive had 1.5 gigs free now, and I want to move all the footage I captured from FCE onto the external.
I know iMovie has an option to export the project and all the files into a single file. Does FCE have an option like this, or do I need to go through finder to where it saved all the footage and move them like that? How can I do this without losing all the links and having to reconnect my media...
hopefully this all makes sense, I've never really used FCE

Hello Drew,
FCE doesn't have that option. You will have to use the Finder to copy the folders/files to your external drive and yes you will have to Reconnect Media after moving the files.
Be sure your external drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended and is connected via Firewire.
In FCE, close your Project. Then in FCE preferences reset your scratch disk location to the new Final Cut Express Documents folder on your external drive. Then exit FCE.
The default FCE scratch disk location is /Users/yourusername/Final Cut Express Documents. Normally your FCE project file and related material is in this folder. Under it you will find the following folders:
Autosave Vault
Capture Scratch
Render Files
Waveform Cache
Thumbnail Cache
and there may be an Audio Render Files folder too
At this point you should be able to find a Final Cut Express Documents folder on your external drive; it should have automatically been created when you reset your FCE preferences earlier, along with an Autosave Vault and a Capture Scratch folder. Copy the files from your internal drive's Autosave Vault and Capture Scratch folders to the corresponding new folders on your external drive. Don't bother copying the render files or cache files - it will be better to re-render after you move your project. Also, if you have any other source media such as photos or music, copy them to a new folder on your external drive. Keep your FCE project file on your internal hard drive but do make a backup copy of it somewhere.
After copying everything, verify & double check that you have good copies of your clips on your external drive because the next step is to delete the originals of your captured clips that are on your internal drive. Don't delete any folders, just the captured clips themselves ... and all the render files. This is necessary so that when you reopen your FCE project it will be forced to reconnect media and you can point it to the new location on your external drive. Otherwise it will just continue to use the clips that are on your internal drive.
Then reopen your Project File that you left on your internal drive and reconnect media when prompted.

I used an external hard drive for my backups via Time Capsule. I bought a new computer and I want to transfer all my old fonts over to the new one but when I go into the Font Library from the hard drive backup but my downloaded fonts aren't there?

I used an external hard drive to back up my computer using Time Capsule before I bought a new one. I am slowly transferring information fromt he backup to my new computer and I want to transfer over my old font book. When I go into the Font folder on the hard drive the only fonts that show up are the ones that came stock with the computer not any of the ones I have downloaded over time. Could they be downloaded somewhere else?

The answer to that would probably be "Yes." If you don't remember where your fonts were stored, you may want to search your backups for any of the font files you know the names to. See where that takes you.
Ideally, Font Book and other font managers will temporarily store the fonts you "installed" into the System when you run the OS. When you shut down, etc. they are removed and reloaded on restart. The permanent place fonts reside is where you saved them when or after you downloaded them. I typically create a Resources folder on the root level of the computer and place a Fonts folder there. Then I install fonts from there, and they are available to all users on that iMac.
Perhaps if you did not have that kind of a strategy, perhaps many of them are still in your Downloads folder?

Broken video card/hard drive backup/no monitor

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