Serious friggin' problem with this hard disk

[deckeda]

A friend with an OS 9 B&W calls me up. Can't get to the desktop. Booting from CD is no better. I get over there and disconnect both internal hard disks. It now boots from CD fully.

Disk 1 seems hosed and won't spin up. Tick, a-tick, a-tick, a-tick
Disk 2, if it's the only HD attached, will allow it to boot fully from CD (switched it to Master of course) And I could see the disk.

Disk 2 is the backup, consisting of daily Retrospect file backups. No problem, I put a fresh OS on a fresh boot HD, along with Retrospect and I'll use that to open up the backups sitting on Disk 2.

Along the way, I run Diskwarrior 2.1 on both drives: the replacement boot disk and backup disk. Diskwarrior immediately reports big problems with the backup drive; I rebuild the directory and all is fine.

On the next reboot, Disk 2 doesn't mount. Drive Setup can see it, says it's unmounted, but can't mount it (grayed out). Intech's Hard Disk Speed Tools can see it but can't mount it or replace its driver because the partition map is bad. Diskwarror no longer even sees the disk. Uh oh. Waiter, check please!!

Took the drive to work, set it to Cable Select and put in a MDD we still have running OS 9. Same as the other Mac, won't mount.

Put the drive in another MDD we have running Panther. Same as the others, no love. Disk Utility doesn't even see it.

Before I stick a fork in it and inform the owner that oh, all years of documents, emails and work docs are now gone, does anyone have any other ideas besides Drive Savers?

[mikebw]

Do you have a newer version of Diskwarrior to try? v 3 maybe, or how about techtool?

[deckeda]

No Techtool. DW3 I have at home. That'll be next in a couple of days when I get a chance.

[Gareth]

Data Rescue II
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_info.php

[rz]

Will Data Rescue II even work on an OS 9 drive?

[incognegro]

Data Rescue II is a great piece of software, especially if DiskWarrior 3 won't do the trick.
It should work on OS 9 drives, not sure why it wouldn't. Data is data.

[Paul F.]

I find it highly likely that it's the B&W that is corrupting the HD's....

I would bet money on it if it's a Rev 1 motherboard!
I have tried using a couple different Rev 1 B&W's and every darn time they've screwed up an HD....

Take it out, shoot it in the CPU and scrounge up a G4 tower to replace it...

[incognegro]

see this page:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/G3-ZONE/yosem...tures.html

the CMD chip is what you want to inspect.

also seen here, with chip designations:

http://www.welovemacs.com/6612194.html

[deckeda]

FWIW, I got an OS X Finder to mount the drive on its own. I've copied what I need onto another HD and am presently Target Disk-moded with a MacBook Pro transferring it out of the Mac and all should be well. Curiously, FW Target Disk mode only works one-way between it and the MDD running OS9.

But to get to that point, it was slow and frustrating because I had to do some things booted into 9 and some when booted into 10, with 10 not being present on the MDD and not having an external drive big enough to hold everything.

In the end I needed no other software, although the OS9 version of Data Rescue might have worked (the demo asked me to adjust the block allocation but I punted). It was when booting into 10 one more time that it showed up on the desktop. Dunno why.