I have the elusive blinking folder on boot with my power book running OS X 3.9 with a question mark. I was on the road to Denver working on a track for an artist I am engineering, I had about 7 tracks going and opened up the Sampler in Logic Pro. It froze, after waiting about a half hour I shut the notebook down. When I rebooted I was in OS X hell. I need to recover this song, I am assuming it’s a bad hard drive. I know there is a way to hook a fire wire drive up and boot the machine to do a complete backup. Before I troubleshot the notebook to see if I can fix it I need to do the data recovery. Any help with the recovery and repair would be absolutely helpful.

Thanks,

-Dino

Boot from the system CD, and attempt to repair your system hard drive with the disk utility

If I only had the system CD, the guy I bought this notbook from didn't give it to me when it arrived through the mail.

If you have access to another computer you can try to start up your laptop in target disk mode. All you have to do is power down your laptop and turn it on again then when you hear the chime press the "T" button on your laptop. Keep holding it down until you see the firewire icon bouncing around in a black screen. Now you should be able to connect your laptop to another computer like an external firewire drive. Hopefully if things aren't too messed up you can get to the data on your laptop. If you connect it to another computer and it ask you to reformat the drive don't do it. I did this before cause I needed to get to some data in a hurry and didn't have time to repair the disk and it worked. Then when I tried rebooting the computer with the problem it found the OS and started up normally but there was still a problem to fix so I ended up backing up my data and doing a clean install. Anyway hope this helps

Valente

It helps big time, I have a firewire drive so I will attemp the back up right away. I will let you all know how it worked out. I wish I could find a copy of OSX .3, I am afraid to reformat with 10.4 because all of the Logic issues I have read about, plus I'm not sure if the disk repair utility will work from Tiger either since the notebook is running 10.3.9

You know working in IT for over 10 years does not mean I am OS X literate. If I get into the shell I have no issues, but the gui I am still quite the novice. It's frusterating but this site helps out so much. Thank you everyone.

Well I tried this several times. All I have is a fire wire icon bouncing around the screen almost like a screen saver. The HDD indicator light on the fire wire drive is not blinking as if it's copying. Any ideas?

When you do this you still need another mac to do the copying. All you are doing when you do this is making your laptop act like a firewire drive. It won't copy anything itself so you still need another mac to transfer the files from your laptop to your external drive. I'm sorry if I didn't make this clear in the previous post. Hopefully you have another working mac handy.

boot the computer holding command-s
it will boot you into a shell.

there it will tell you two commands to run.
type those in and press return.

that will repair your journal/filesystem without a restore cd.

According to apples tech support database holding down the “T” key with a firewire drive connected during boot will copy a mirror of the HDD to the firewire drive. That is if your drive is going to work at all, mine did not. I did try to boot to the shell, I’m very experienced with the shell but it wouldn't boot to it. I also reset the power settings and tried to repair the disk with an OS X install disk from the same exact power book a friend owns. None were successful, it looks like my data is a goner unfortunately. I did install a new 5400 RPM HDD in the notebook, I will run the install tonight when I get home. I may send the old HDD out for a white room data recovery depending on how much it costs. Thank you everyone for your assistance, it was very helpful.

dino,

I have never heard of using Target disk mode to automatically copy files to an external firewire drive without another mac in the mix. From KBase article # 58583 it states:



I would try again by booting your powerbook into target disk mode (hold down T during boot until you get the bouncing firewire icon) and then connect it to another mac to see if your hard drive mounts. If it does, try to repair the disk again using the latest version of Disc Utility (v.10.5.1) or Disk Warrior (about $90 from Alsoft) to repair your directory and possibly recover your drive.

The only time that an "automatic" copy of files takes place from Target disk mode is when your machine is in target disk mode connected to a Mac with Mac OS X v10.3.5 or later and you have just installed a fresh OS onto the drive. This is accomplished with the Migration Assistant utility and it is meant to save time in setting up a new machine, not necessarily recovering a failed one.

Hope this helps.

peace,
deacon