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TICKET ARCHIVE -> G5 Wont Start Up

Facamus - Jul 29, 2005 - 6:46 pm

My G5 won't boot up. I know other people have had this problem, but let me explain my situation, because it's probably slightly different.

It was working fine, and then it froze, and I was forced to turn it off with the power button. Then when I tried to restart it, it would give me a white screen with a gray Apple logo and no startup chimes. It would sit at that screen with no spinning wheel, and the fans would begin to get really loud, so I'd turn it off.

I've tried things that have been suggested (removing peripherals and RAM, fsck, safe boot), but nothing has worked. I finally found my Tiger install DVD and booted up while pressing C. It started up fine, but when I opened disk utility and tried to "Repair Disk" ("Repair Disk Permissions" was grayed out) I got this error message:

Verify and Repair disk "disk0s3"
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Catalog file entry not found for extent
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of am error


Can you tell me what this means, and where I should go from here?

DeltaMac - Jul 29, 2005 - 9:10 pm

If you don't see your volume name in Disk Utility, and only the generic 'disk0s3' then your volume seems to be gone. You can try a good third-party disk repair utility, such as DiskWarrior, or Drive Genius, which may help recover your drive. Or, if you are not too concerned about losing everything on your hard drive - Start up with your restore DVD, and erase the drive, then restore the original 'stuff'.

You will probably have to erase the drive, but you need to consider if it is worthwhile to save your data.

Let me know how it goes.
- Dale

Facamus - Jul 30, 2005 - 10:28 pm

Thanks for the help (although it didn't work). Drive Genius didn't do anything, but I found Data Rescue on the same site. I tried hooking to another computer and using my G5 as a firewire hard drive, but it wouldn't recognize my hard drive, so I'm now trying Data Rescue, and that seems to be working. So, once I get all my files transfered, I'll just reformat the hard drive. Thanks again for the help.

DeltaMac - Jul 30, 2005 - 10:34 pm

For this type of problem, you should erase the drive using the 'write zeroes to all blocks' option. This will take a long time, but a marginal hard drive should also fail during the erase, and you can be pretty certain that the hard drive is bad.

- Dale