FYI: Corrupt hard drive will cause target disk mode to fail

I have just finished restoring my nephew's iBook which had had a major disk corruption issue - keys out of order, invalid key lengths, etc. in the catalog. While the iBook would boot, it had a lot of problems running due to the corrupt file system.
As part of the restoration process, I tried to connect the iBook in target disk mode, but had a lot of trouble. Apparently, bad file system data structures will cause the target disk mode to hang; I needed to disconnect the iBook from my main system to get out of the SPOD. In the end, I booted the iBook from the installation DVD and ran Disk Utility from there to reformat the hard drive. Surprisingly, it was impossible to reformat the drive in target disk mode due to the corruption.
Once the disk was reformatted, target disk mode worked fine, and I was able to restore the entire system (less files lost due to the corruption) in that mode.

It is impossible to say what can be recovered without knowing the cause of the installation failure. The possibilities range from some interfering third party addition to the previously installed OS to a substandard or degraded hardware component (especially RAM) that can't meet the more stringent demands of the new OS version.
All I can suggest is to try Target Disc Mode & see what you can recover to another drive -- one that your bother should have had for backups to begin with & should now see the value of having if he did not before.
If that doesn't work, the alternatives are investing in special data recovery software (moderately expensive) or a data recovery service (very, very expensive).

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    Message was edited by: Suz

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