My eMac wont start, how can I get all my stuff on the harddrive?

G'day,

"my eMac wont start up"...

Bit hard to tell from this... but if you're happy to toss the eMac in the trash... after getting the HDD contents... there's 2 possibilities:

1) Press the power button, and then press and hold the "t" key. Hopefully the eMac will boot into target disk mode - blue screen with a yellow firewire icon. If this works, then you can just go buy a 6pin to 6pin firewire cable, in order to connect the eMac to another Mac via the firewire port. The eMac's hard drive will appear on the other Mac, and you can copy the data off.

IF this doesn't work... ie the computer wont start up at all... no power...

2) Search google and find the "take apart" or technical manual for your model eMac, and disassemble it to the point you can remove the hard drive physically. Then put it into an external case and get the data off that way...

UNLESS of course, it's the hard drive that's dead...

More info for us on what's going wrong?

cheers

cosmic

The best manual to learn how to remove the hard drive is the eMac Service Source manual from Apple. PDFs of the manual can be found on the internet. I can't post a link to it because it is copyrighted. But you may have some luck with Google. Good luck.

alloedee wrote:
After I tried to install the 10.4 update, my eMac wont start up.

OK so perhaps a bad install. Can you still boot up off the Install/Restore discs? Either the original ones that came with the eMac or the new OS discs?
Patrick