IMac G5 20". Disk died. Machine won't boot. Can't see replacement drive.

Machine was on, but frozen. I power cycled and it wouldn't boot. I removed the drive and put it in an external SATA case and was able to mount it on my MBP and copy 50GB of stuff off. I'll pick through it later. I got a new drive at Fry's and put it in. I popped in the Tiger install disk and ran Disk Utility. It didn't even show the internal drive. I ran System Profiler and the Serial ATA section said "No information available." Uh-oh. Is the interface fried? I bought the machine in March 2005 so it's not that old.
Thanks for any help,
Al

I have a replacement disk. Easy enough to install.
I checked again. I can't verify the other end of the drive cables. They disappear under the motherboard and I just don't want to tear the whole thing apart. I notice that many capacitors on the motherboard have bowed tops when they should be very flat.
While an external FW drive would probably work, the speed of the interface would be a limiting factor as the drive itself claims 1.5Gb/sec or 3Gb/sec. I wonder if that's just the drive, or the interface into the machine itself.
I checked the repair extension programs. These specific symptoms do not match the documented issues. The machine can boot a Tiger install DVD just fine. It's just the %&$&^* SATA interface itself.
Thanks for the suggestions,
Al

Similar Messages

Yosemite install, trim enabled, won't boot, can't erase hard drive

I recently upgraded to Yosemite, enabled FileVault and foolishly enabled TRIM (had no idea it wasn't supported).
Upon restart, my machine gets the grey screen with the crossed-out circle of death.
After figuring out what happened, I then attempted to restore from a Time Machine backup (10.9). The backup failed almost immediately, but did manage to erase the HD (or at least the partition is gone).
Now I'm completely stuck. Disk Utility can see this drive, but cannot erase or re-partition it. The drive isn't mounted so I cannot access it with Terminal (at least with my level of knowledge). cd /Volumes/mydrive doesn't work - no such directory.
I have re-installed Yosemite on my second hard drive and booted from there. I tried Disk Utility again and I still have no options available to erase or partition my original disk, although it is there.
Can anyone help me get my original disk back into functioning form? If I can just get the disk erased and partitioned, I can load my Time Machine backup and be off to the races. Thanks!

TRIM is on the software side. Therefore if you are going to erase the whole disk and do a clean install of Yosemite, TRIM will not be enabled. If i understand the mechanism of TRIM and OS X right, TRIM is usually only enabled when using an official Apple SSD (e.g. on the newer MacBooks).
Now lets go back to the issue with the erasing. If there is something wrong with the partition/the installation on it, i personally would download ubuntu and erase the SSD. "My HD" is your SSD, isn't it? There is a utility called "hdparm" which lets you erase SSDs quite fast and easily from a linux-terminal (usually it takes only seconds and there are only two lines of terminal-code needed). Unfortunately i couldn't find this tool for os x.
But maybe there is also a solution without using another distribution. Did you try to start the disk utility during the startup of your pc by holding "command + R" ?
Or you could try to create a usb stick with the Yosemite installation and access the disk utility from there. This would prevent the system to mount any partition and maybe let's you format the hard drive.
EDIT: I just found this article: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/6278/how-to-securely-erase-an-ssd-drive /6287#6287
What's the result, if you type "df -k" in your terminal? (it will only display the available space left on your hard disks etc.) There should be two entries for /dev/disk. One should be your "Boot"-Drive and the other should be the broken "My HD".

Hi there. just bought a TC, installation was succesfull, but time machine won't work. can't select Backup disk. get transferred to TC install again. Called Apple, 25 min. later no succes, have to call on monday again!!!! Can anyone help me? Thanks a lot.

Hi there. just bought a TC, installation was succesfull, but time machine won't work. can't select Backup disk. get transferred to TC install again. Called Apple, 25 min. later no succes, have to call on monday again!!!! Can anyone help me? Thanks a lot.

See #Q1 in Using Time Machine with a Time Capsule.
If you have a problem, please tell us exactly what, and on which step there.

IMac G5 iSight, flashing question mark, won't boot from CD

iMac G5 iSight, flashing question mark, won't boot from CD

Your hard drive has probably died. The ? means that the machine can't find any drive to boot to.

I need to back up my imac running Tiger (no time machine) so that we can upgrade OS. It is set up for multiple accounts. How do I capture all files in each account using newly purchased USB external hard drive?

I need to back up my imac running Tiger (no time machine) so that we can upgrade OS. It is set up for multiple accounts. How do I capture all files in each account using newly purchased USB external hard drive? Thanks!

Backup Software Recommendations
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
SuperDuper!
Synk Pro
Tri-Backup
Others may be found at VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore. Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files.
Or you can simply use the Restore option of Disk Utility to clone the drive to the backup:
Clone using Restore Option of Disk Utility
Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder.
Select the destination volume from the left side list.
Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.
Check the box labeled Erase destination.
Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the Destination entry field.
Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to the Source entry field.
Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.
Destination means the external backup drive. Source means the internal startup drive.

Machine won't boot

XP Pro
AMD 64 3000+
MSI K8T NEO MB
I was installing some windows updates and another piece of software at the same time. The other software finished first, so I clicked ok - and it auto-rebooted my machine (gdammit I hate that). Now my machine won't boot at all. Black screen with no data being sent to it, no error messages, codes, beeps ... NOTHING. All the fans are on, the CD light blinks a few times, hard disk seems to spin, but NOTHING AT ALL happens.
What can I do to fix it if I can't get to *ANY* bootable device?
I noticed the cd light blink, so I put the XP install disk in, but that did nothing. At one point after a cold boot, the floppy turned so I popped in a boot disk ... crunch, beep, repeat. That was no help either.
Someone said I should reset the bios/cmos via the jumper on the mobo. Someone else suggested I disconnec the PS for a minute, reconnect and try again.
Ideas? Please help me.
Thanks.

Quote
Someone said I should reset the bios/cmos via the jumper on the mobo. Someone else suggested I disconnec the PS for a minute, reconnect and try again.
...that is good advice...I would add that you unplug (either at the wall or at the back of the power supply) the PSU when you clear the CMOS...clearing the CMOS is a vital troubleshooting procedure...
...what was the other software?..just curious...

Help - My machine won't boot and I cannot get into the BIOS - 990FXA-GD65

I have been trying to install an AHCI driver for use by WinXP, so far with no success (see this link: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=161637.0 )
However, following my last unsuccessful attempt, I had to take a break from running any more attempts and switched off the machine for several days.
I have come back to it tonight and I find that the machine won't boot at all and that pressing DEL or F11 after starting won't take me to the BIOS or the boot menu. The display shows nothing, other than 'No HDMI signal'
Are there any tests I can do to establish what might be wrong?
pbb

Thankfully the machine has come back.
I tried a couple of cmos/battery clears, with no success.
Then I took out one stick of memory, cleared the cmos and it all worked on rebooting!
I put back the memory slug, cleared cmos again and it continues to work!!
What a relief - thanks xmad.

G4 Cube, won't boot, can't eject DVD

hello, o great mac gurus of the cyberworld. here is my situation. i have a G4 cube that is being extremely tempermental. the something isn't working, and the machine won't boot. i inserted the os X install DVD and tried re-installing te software. of course, it failed. now i can't get the DVD out. i tried the eject key. i tried holding down the 'E' key on startup. i tried holding down the mouse button on startup. NOTHING.
help? any suggestions on what to do next? thanks to all who read, and especially those who respond.
erik

sorry, folks... found a post that had THE answer. thanks for looking in the short minute it was posted...

I have a 2012 Mini with a fusion drive that won't boot from a usb cloned drive. It came with 10.8.2 pre installed. I have zapped the PRAM and reset the SMC. Any thoughts?

I have a 2012 Mini with a fusion drive that won't boot from a usb cloned drive. It came with 10.8.2 pre installed. I have zapped the PRAM and reset the SMC. Any thoughts?

When I tried using a recently downloaded (from the App store) version of MtLion 10.8.2 (12C60) I could NOT get the new MacMini to install or boot from a USB I had previously made. I was however able to use the Recovery Mode of the MacMini to create a bootable SSD which I had installed. The problem arose when I went back into Recovery DU as it saw the seperate drives (SSD & HD) as a broken Fusion Drive. Interestingly DU from the boot volume had NO issues and reported NO faults. It was the Recovery DU that identified the faulty Fusion Drive configuration. At this point I am definately out of my depth but my speculation is that the Recovery Volume is being used in some fashion to form the method or pattern that DU assigns files to the drives, System Report sees the drives as seperate volumes with all their individual characteristics.
Disk Utility did not make a bootable USB, I don't have or use CCC or Super Duper.
Here is the longer version I've been compiling:
Having bought a late 2012 Mac Mini(6,2) i7 2.66GHZ with the standard 1TB 5400 HD and 4GB of RAM (base model) I immediately decided to install a Mercury Elite 6g 240GB SSD and up the RAM to 16GB. I received both shipments on the same day and had all my new toys in front of me. After following the video advice on OWC’s website for the installation of the second drive I started the mini and formatted the SSD to accept the OS from Recovery on the original HD. This MacMini shipped with 10.8.2 (12C2034) as the OS, the normal build of 10.8.2 is (12C60). Having used Recovery Disk Utility to format the SSD it came back with an error that DU could’t Repair. I went ahead and installed the OS on the SSD and the Mini booted normally from both drives. The issue I encountered with this setup was that iMovie encountered an “unexpected error” and would not save a completed project. I therefore decided to figure the drive issue out because I suspect the new Fusion File Management software didn’t like my configuration with drives that Recovery DU saw as needing to be “fixed”. After spending some time on the phone with both OWC and Apple Support I took the plunge and used Internet Recovery Disk Utility and allowed both drives to be “fixed” after which DU created a Fusion Drive (Logical Drive) that I then ran Repair Disk on and it showed up as a single drive in DU. It works perfectly as described by Apple’s site:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5446
Having checked the Link Speed and Negotiated Speed they both show as 6g so I’m pleased not to have lost performance due to it being fuzed to a 3g 5400 drive. The biggest drawback is that Apple’s Fusion Management only allows for 1 additional partition and I would have preferred more than that.
I have sourced some additional information here:
http://blog.macsales.com/15619-special-note-for-adding-an-ssd-to-a-2012-mac-mini ?
http://blog.macsales.com/15619-special-note-for-adding-an-ssd-to-a-2012-mac-mini ?
http://blog.macsales.com/15619-special-note-for-adding-an-ssd-to-a-2012-mac-mini ?
http://blog.fosketts.net/2011/08/05/undocumented-corestorage-commands/
If anyone has a factory Fusion Drive could you please post the Link and Negotiated Speeds of both drives? This information can be found in Apple > About This Mac > More Info… > System Report > Serial ATA and the drives should show up as discrete drives with their info listed separately.

A205-S5000 won't boot. Says possible hard drive problem

Laptop won't boot and says possible hard drive problem. Need to recover
personal reports and data, so thinking of removing the drive and using an enclosure
so the data, if still good, can be extracted from the drive by another computer. Question
is, will I be able to create the restore cd's from the hard drive if the hard drive is not the
boot drive ie; attached to a 2nd computer via usb and enclosure.
If it's not possible, I can try to create cd's from a different model laptop (toshiba), same vista os but
what about the product key? I will try to reinstall the bad drive and try a reboot to recovery mode but
I doubt that is going to work or complete. Idea was to get a new drive and try to install recovery disks.

Satellite A205-S5000
Recovery discs must be from an identical model. If you can't burn them from that computer, best to order them
Order Toshiba Recovery Media
The restored Windows is pre-activated.
-Jerry

I need to use an hp 6215 printer with my mac book pro. the driver installation disk doesn't work. where can i get a driver that will work? i use OS X

i need to use an hp 6215 printer with my mac book pro. the driver installation disk doesn't work. where can i get a driver that will work?

With the Lion it is essentially unnecessary to resort to external driver disks. What's more, most of those disks are incompatible with the OS and should not be used. The system already carries a wide variety of printer description files (aka PPDs, which is what modern printing systems use as "drivers") for a lot of brands. And there was an HP printer update just two days ago.
Just checked in mine and did indeed find that the HP OfficeJet 6200 Series, with or without Fax, is covered with the latest update.
So just go thru the motions of creating a proper printer instance:
Make sure the Mac "sees" the printer on the network.
System Preferences / Print & Scan
Click on the + button on the left column
Select the appropriate type of printer, will use IP for the rest of this
Select HP Jetdirect - Socket, default for HP network printers
Type the IP address or look it up
Name the printer for easy identification on the print dialog
Let the Mac identify the printer model or manually choose the driver
Click Add.
Once the instance pops up in the list, can click on Options & Supplies for further config.

Time Machine over network: can't see hard drive

I've connected an external firewire 800 drive to our server and then chosen it in Server Preference as a drive that users can backup to, however when I try to select it in the user's Time Machine prefs I can't see the drive. Any ideas?

Is no one else having this problem?

My 27" iMac (2009) won't boot OSX from the internal drive

Here's a fun problem. After installing Sophos anti-virus and starting a (VERY slow) full scan, a day or two later I found my iMac frozen at the screensaver. It was completely unresponsive so I did a hard reboot, at which point it got as far as starting to boot Lion (apple logo on screen, spinning indicator showing) before stalling indefinitely in that state with the indicator spinning.
I restarted and booted from the recovery partition, launched disk utility, and discovered that the SMART status of the drive was "failing". The machine would still boot from the recovery partition and my boot camp partition, but I assumed that the disk failing was why the OSX partition wouldn't boot (the recovery partition worked, as did the windows 7 bootcamp partition). I replaced the factory-installed internal HDD with another of the same make, model, and capacity (Seagate 1TB), and performed a restore from the Time Machine backup on my Drobo.
The result was the same as the original problem - it wouldn't boot, hung with the indicator spinning. Thinking that the Sophos scan was somehow responsible (in-progress when the last TM backup was made) I tried restoring to a backup a few days older, (to the best of my recall from BEFORE I downloaded Sophos) only to have the same result.
Anyone have any ideas? I made a clean install of Lion (using the recovery partition on my old internal HDD, now connected externally via USB) to an external drive while I was waiting for the replacement hard disk to arrive, and it boots fine from that. I haven't tried a clean install to the internal HDD yet, as I'd obviously prefer to recover my installed apps as they were before, that being the point of a Time Machine backup, right?

You have a serious drive issue that likely can't be repaired that way.
Follow the data recovery efforts here, your drive still works and thus data can be recovered, won't be easy
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3172
If you have your data off the machine, to a storage drive (or earlier with TM)
then hold command r keys and use Disk Utility to Erase the Lion Partiton with Zero option, and reinstall Lion from Apple's servers.
use the same name (important), different password ok Software Update fully
install your programs from fresh orignal sources and return files into their respective folders
once your stable, read the backup proceedures here etc.
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3045
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents
note, don't move your computer while it's operating

External 'boot disk' for G5 won't boot

First attempt was to make an OS 10.5.? boot disk from the installation DVD. The second attempt was to use Carbon Copy Cloner to make an exact duplicate of the internal Boot Macintosh HD disk. Both onto one of a pair of external 4Tb Iomega drives. Connection is Firewire 800 daisychain. The external drive in question is the last in the daisychain. The G5 has twin internal drives already and the G5 will boot happily from either. (One is 10.5.8, the second is 10.4.11/Classic.)
Both installations attempts on the #2 4Tb drive appeared to "work". The now CCC version is an exact copy of the main internal drive and is OS 10.5.8. 'Startup Disk' appears to recognise it as a system boot disk. I can select it for booting on restart but it fails to do so and eventually finds the main internal drive after some wait.
Holding down the Option key as you restart the machine brings up just the two choices of the two internal drives to start from - no external drive choice.
This all used to work just fine in the days of SCSI...
I'm presuming altering the order of the external drives on the Firewire chain won't make any difference?

jsd2 wrote:
Both onto one of a pair of external 4Tb Iomega drives.
I wonder if such a drive is just too big to boot a PPC Mac.
Hmm. Interesting thought. You have a good point.
I just found this technote:
*Secrets of the GPT*
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2166/_index.html
It contains the following regarding the Apple Partition Map scheme:
APM is restricted to 32-bits worth of blocks. With a standard block size of 512 bytes, this translates to a maximum disk size of 2 TB.
In Disk Utility, if you again click on the upper icon as before, and look again at the lower right of the window, what does it say for "Total Capacity?" Does it report the full 4TB?
It reports the full size - strictly it reports 3.6Tb - ie well over 2Tb.
(I do have the hardware option of switching to twin 2Tb on these 4Tb Iomega drives and strictly, that is what is inside the physical housing. It's a matter of throwing some switches. Of course, I don't actually want 2Tb drives. )
MacBook Pro (10.5.8) Power Mac G5
It might be of interest regarding the capability of the drive enclosure hardware to connect the drive to your MacBook Pro, repartition it as GUID (which will erase it), install OS X on it or clone the MBP to it, and then see if the MBP will boot from it.
Hmm. I don't think I want to do that as the MBP is an Intel machine and the G5 isn't. It won't solve the actual problem. (At least I can't see how it will.) Though I see what you are getting at.
It's probably worth a shot emailing Iomega, I guess.

New machine won't boot

I've had this new machine up for about a week and a half, and all of a sudden it started hanging (freezing) on me tonight. Other than the drivers, utilities, etc. that came w/ the various hardware, I haven't installed much software: Office 2007, Firefox, AIM, and one game (TimeShift). Everything was working great until tonight. Except I had noticed that when I left the machine for a while and it went to sleep, when I tried to wake it up by moving the mouse, the screen would come up w/ my background and nothing else. I would have to reboot to get it going again. Tonight it all escalated. It first hung when I was using Firefox. Next time it was after I saw a brief message about an 'access error' on the raid mirror. I then went into the nVidia Control panel, and it froze again. No response from the keyboard or mouse at all. Sometimes, the mouse pointer would disappear completely, and w/ still no response from the keyboard I'd have to reboot. The last time windows was up, I tried to see if the game would start - it froze again. After I pressed the reset button that time, it has not booted again.
I'm using the software raid (Raid 1 mirror), and it says the mirror is "healthy". I can get into the Raid Setup and everything looks fine. But when I get past the post, right when you're supposed to see the Windows moving bar, I hear a faint 'click', and then nothing - black screen. I can also get to the BIOS just fine, and nothing appears to have changed. It's possible that one of the hard drives is bad, but after all the trouble I had trying to get Raid to work on this board (cold boot issue, etc.), I also think that the board may be suspect. I guess I will try disconnecting one of the drives, and see if it will boot off of one or the other. But I would sure appreciate any other suggestions too!
TIA

Quote from: drachenfire on 09-February-08, 14:27:20
Well, I found I can boot off of the first drive (slot Sata 1), but not the second (slot Sata 2). So I guess it might be the hard drive which is having a problem. The odd thing is, that when both drives are plugged in, it won't boot. If I disconnect the second one it will boot. I thought that was the purpose of mirroring - if one drive went bad, it would boot off of the good one, and then you replace the bad one and rebuild your mirror. Perhaps that means there something wrong w/ the nVidia raid?? I've never used raid before on a machine, so I don't have any experience with this sort of thing. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
No, the mirroring means you have a safe copy of your data, you will still need 2 disks........

IMac G5 20". Disk died. Machine won't boot. Can't see replacement drive.

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for