Powerbook stuck on apple icon screen

It would be good if you had your installer disk so just in case you needed to run Repair Disk you could. At this point you need to press the power button until the powerbook shuts down. Then power up and hold down the track pad button to eject the dvd. Hopefully after that the powerbook will start up. Post back what happens.

An Apple store would be ideal. Don't use someone else's disks. You could also try shutting down and then booting up holding down the 'command-s' keys. That should get you into single user mode. If you get there at the prompt type:
fsck -yf
then hit return. If there are repairs noted run it again until there are no repairs for two trys. Then type:
shut down -h now
then hit return. The Mac will shut down. Then restart.
Post back.

If it's still on, insert the disk. Then shut down. Then start up while holding down the 'c' key until you see the gray apple and spinning gear. When it's finished booting select your language. From the menu:
Utilities>Disk Utility. Select your hard drive and Repair Disk.

I had this once before and I remembered a Tech Note on the subject. A quick Google search and:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302672

See the bottom of the note. The fsck fix worked for me.

Remember, any time you get an error message, google and quotes are your friends.

I missed that fsck had already been posted - sorry!

Try bringing up your book in Target Disk mode on another Mac. Then run Disk Utility on the 2nd Mac and see if that works. If that doesn't work, then it is quite possible your hard drive is bad. Having just replaced one myself, it isn't that difficult to replace (of course you would lose everything already on that drive). Taking it to an Apple Store and having them run complete diagnostics on it should uncover any underlying hardware problems.

BTW: I was able to use Data Rescue II to recover most of what was on my bad hard drive before I replaced it (those things that I hadn't backed up)

That is close to what I paid. If I remember correctly, there are plans on xlr8yourmac.com for cracking open a 15" Al, if not - there are step by step guides available, just search for them.

Ugh... the same thing happened to me; I was just using my comp, some stupid video-encoding program messed up and froze it, so I restarted and get the ?? flashing HD thing... the cmd-s doesn't work, same error msg from the disk repair, and I even tried my Applecare Protection Plan cd, that just freezes and gives me that kernal message when I start up from that.

I can always erase and start over, but I'm mostly concerned about recovering my stuff. I'm not really sure what Target Disk is (I have other macs), how do I do that? and what should I use to recover my HD? The problem is that it doesn't even recognize there's anything on my HD. When this happened on my iMac (which crashed two or three times), I had OS 9 on there and was able to just start up from that and backup my stuff, but I never got around to installing OS 9 on the PowerBook :\ How do I use that other program mentioned (I'm gonna google it when I'm done writing this), the one for restoring the lost HD?

Thanks guys.

Target Disc mode mounts the hard drives attached (internal or external) to one Mac, on a second Mac. This is done for many reasons, sometimes to move files, other times to run various utilities on the main drive of a computer without having to boot from the CD/DVD.

The process for you is quite simple. Take the powered-off Powerbook with the problem drive and connect it to a second powered-on Mac with a FireWire cable. Then, power on the Powerbook while holding down the T key on the keyboard of said PowerBook. Very quickly, a symbol that looks like a Y should appear on the screen of the PowerBook and very quickly afterword any working disc on the Powerbook should show up on the 2nd Mac.

The program I use to recover (NOT REPAIR) bad hard drives is called Data Rescue II. I have used it in a number of cases to rescue the data on hard drives that no other utility can do anything with (even see sometimes). You run it on the 2nd Mac, and hope that it sees the bad drive on the PowerBook at which point you can get what you can off it (you need to have another drive to put the recovered data). You can try Data Rescue for free, it will show you if it can see the drive and what it can see on it. To recover data, you have to buy the utility. And yes, it can find stuff on drives that look empty.

Good Luck.

Hi, Mark. You wrote:

Target Disc mode mounts the hard drives attached (internal *or external*) to one Mac, on a second Mac.

(boldface added)

Apple says: "Important: Unplug all other FireWire devices from both computers prior to using FireWire target disk mode. Do not plug in any FireWire devices until after you have disconnected the two computers from each other, or have stopped using target disk mode." So if an external HD connects via FireWire, don't have it connected to either computer when using FWTDM.

I don't know whether or not external USB drives are subject to the same warning.

Well I did pretty much everything except bother with Date Rescue, I'm not paying for that. It wasn't showing up with the t-mode, and some guy had some terminal codes for how to mount an unreadable drive in read-only or something, but that didn't work either.

Somehow, the target disc mode was able to read my DiskWarrior CD (which was in my powerbook), so I used that and it actually saw my broken drive and said it could fix it, so I told it to... it froze about halfway through, so I force-quit and now it won't even recognize the harddrive at all from any programs I've used, during TDM and even in the disk utility off the install cd, so I can't even erase it.

I was only really concerned with losing my 40gb of music, but now I don't even care. I just want my computer back and I can't even erase the harddrive now to start over -_- Any ideas?