My G4 HD is dead forever?

[web_james]

Hi there,

I've been running OS 9.2.2 and OS X 10.1.5 for a wile.
The OS 9 was not so healty and in the last couple months OS 10 was also not so healty ( it didn't shut down).
So I decide to instal OS 10.2.1. At first glance everything was fine, but soon my OS 9 didn't start up on X, so I change the start up disk to OS 9 and made a restart to pass Norton Utilities. That was the last day my Mac have been seen alive. At that moment it start up on OS 9 or OS X. I try Norton. I try installing OS 9.2.2 again. I try installing OS X 10.2.1 agin, but the install wizard doesn't find my HD. It's like it's not formated!
I mounted the HD on a G4 Silver as a slave, but no luck; it wont detect.
I even try on a PC with MacDrive software...
I've got some information that I want to keep, so I do not want to format the disk. That's the big problem. Any ideas? Any similar problem?

Thank's

web_james

[Mikef]

I've been here a few times, I've found disk recovery on a Mac difficult. I tend to 'look' at the disk on OS 9.x with an early version of Silverlining. If that states the disk had is parked then the disk is removed and placed in a PC.

Then I use Norton Diskedit from the DOS command line, if this cannot access the disk then it's probably terminal. However I have recovered one hard disk with stuck heads by giving it a sharp lateral blow. This freed the heads and allowed data to be recovered, the disk was binned immediately after.

Best of luck
Mike
Now where's my daily backup?

[web_james]

Thank's Mike.
I'm starting to think it's lost forever...

[web_james]

I can't see the disk at all.
And I lost my hope in recovering the system (wither OS 9 or OS X).
All I want is to recover some important files.

[jmnw]

I would say try to reinstall OSX over top of the old -- not a clean install which would erase previous data. Then I would highly recommend DiskWarrior to defrag your files.