dead mac - wont boot off firewire drive. Help!

[karavite]

My G4 DP 1 GHZ for the first time in 4 years froze earlier this week and again tonight (I just ran the latest 10.3 upgrade - that will teach me I guess). Problem is this time it will not restart and I get the flashing ? icon. I ran the hardware CD and no problems detected there. I have a firewire drive I backed up to complete with Carbon Copy Cloner just about a week ago (before I ran the software update), but I cannot get the mac to boot off the firewire drive. First I tried the Command-Option-Shift-Delete on start up, but it just sat there for 15 minutes - no boot up. I tried just using Option on start up, but I only see two icons - one a sort of circle arrow and one a arrow pointing to the right and neither does anything noticable when clicked.

How the heck can I get my Mac to boot off this drive? Of course I cannot select it as the start up drive with a Mac that won't start. I'm trying to be calm, but any help would be appreciated.

[karavite]

P.S. I have never needed this, but isn't there some way to boot my Mac in a "safe mode" and run some sort of fix disk command? Would that be worth trying? Help on that would also be appreciated, but mainly I want to get it running from that firewire drive!

[karavite]

I am so happy - it is just a dead drive! Thank the Lord for Carbon Copy Cloner!!! Becasue without it a dead drive would have been a disaster.

I finally got the bad drive to boot and while I was at it I ran Disk Utility. It said my internal drive reported a fatal hardware error and to get busy backing up data. One question please. I have 2 internal drives. The one that died and a second internal drive that just has data (no system installed). Now that I can boot off the firewire external drive, I can no longer see/mount that second internal data only drive. I copied a few important files to it (my mail directory and my latest quicken data). Why can't I see it? Is it because the other internal drive is hosed? I am going to keep the whole thing shut down until I get a new internal drive and perhaps that data only drive will pop up once I get a working internal system drive?

[MrNivit1]

you should be able to physically switch the ordering of the drives and see the second working drive that way. Better yet, remove the broken drive, leave the working one in there as the primary drive and install a copy of OS X on it. You could also just remove the broken drive and use the external firewire drive as you start-up disk to get your data off of the working drive. I would think the second drive is completely fine and just wait until you get a new drive to replace the broken one as the safest way to go about this. Kudos on the back-up firewire drive. A hosed drive could've been a lot worse (personal experience).

P.S. to run safe mode (and also run 'fsck -y' in the process), just hold down the shift key right after pressing the power key.

[karavite]

Thanks MrNivit1! I went to Best Buy and bought not just one, but 2 new drives (Seagate 120 GB - Ultra ATA 100) and all seems well with the world, though I was worried I couldn't find an Ultra ATA (they had a few among dozens of SATA's).

You were right - the "data only" drive popped up as soon as I started the Mac with the new drives installed. I am actually using CCC to copy my system disk to one of the new drives while I write this (using my wife's iMac for this).

Any way, thanks for the help. I was a bit panicky because over 16 years and 12 Macs I have never had a hard drive fail until yesterday. And yet, through all that I have been religous about backing up. I guess it paid off!

Hey, can I bother you (or anyone) with one more question. I now have 3 internal drives, all set to Cable Select. I read somewhere that jumper settings of master and slave(s) can improve performance. I work with FCP and this computer is just fine for me. So, my question is this; should I not even worry about my drives jumper settings and let things be?

Take care!