Upgrade install died during upgrade - stuck

Question

Hi,
last night I was upgrading my Ti-book to Leopard, when it finished and tried to install/reboot additional OS X packages over the internet, it died when updating the OS. Now when I try to reboot its just the white background and spinning wheel (forever). So if I reboot off the leopard DVD, the only option it says I can do is to reformat the HD ;-{
Tried to archive and reinstall, but not enough room. I booted it in Target mode while connected to another Mac, and it came up once, but then the connection died. I cannot get the target mode connection re-established anymore. My Ti-book comes up with the floating firewire symbol, and acts like its in target mode, but the G4 desktop machine cannot connect. I have tried rebooting both, disconnected the firewire, etc, but no diff.
So is there any other way I can get some of my data off the HD on the Ti-book? I have a lot of purchased itunes songs and other data which I'd like to get off the ti-book.
I tried disk warrior, but my old version won't work now since leopard is partially installed.
help!
thanks
'mark

Answer 1

Hi, m_. FireWire Target Disk Mode offers the best chance for a) DiskWarrior to be able to rebuild a directory on the drive, or b) Data Rescue II, FileSalvage, or VirtualLab data recovery software to recover some of your files even if DiskWarrior can do nothing with the hosed drive.
DW or any of the data recovery utilities may be able to work with the drive even if it doesn't mount on the host machine in FWTDM.
Another possible approach to the problem, if you need to regain the use of the Powerbook ASAP, is to remove the hard drive from it, install a new one and install an OS on it, and put the old one in an external FireWire enclosure so you can therapize it and try to recover your data at your leisure.