imac g4 won't boot; black screen

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imac g4 won't boot; black screen

Hi,

I have a question about a friend's imac g4 (1.25 gz). When I press the power button I can hear the startup chime, but the screen stays black. At first I thought it was the display, so I started up in target disk mode; however, the hard drive would only show up in disk utility on the host computer. When I tried to verify and repair the disk I got an error. Here is a screen shot of what it said.

http://img812.imageshack.us/i/diskerror.png/

Was this error because disk utility said the hard drive wasn't mounted?

The imac's CD drive doesn't work, so I tried to use an external CD drive to boot from the install disk, but it didn't come up with the boot options when I held down the option key--just a black screen. If the hard drive was bad, would it cause a black screen?

Thanks in advance,
Peter

intel imac 21.5" screen, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Jan 22, 2011 11:33 AM

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Answer 1

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Dale Weisshaar

Level 6

15,870 points

Jan 25, 2011 9:52 PM in response to pythonkid94

Keep in mind that you have to repair a drive with a Disk Utility version that is the same OS as the one you are trying to repair. Example, 10.5's Disk Repair on a 10.5 system. Otherwise you will get erroneous errors. If you did that, read on.

pythonkid94 wrote:
Was this error because disk utility said the hard drive wasn't mounted?

No, it said Disk Utility's Disk Repair couldn't fix it. It may be so damaged that it will not mount.

If Disk Utility can't fix it, you'll need a more robust utility to repair it.

I would recommend DiskWarrior. It is the best at directory repairs. It rebuilds then actually replaces your old directory. I feel every Mac owner should have a copy.

It also has File System repair now and hard drive S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics.

Make sure you get the disk so you can boot up on it to run repairs. You can also install it on another drive and run it from there to repair this one. DW works faster that way. But sometimes a badly damaged system can be deemed unrepairable by the installed version, but if booted and repaired from the DW disk it may be repairable. This has happened to me.

I use DW once a month to try and catch errors in my system from getting too far out of hand. It has repaired every little and big issue I have ever had with my three Macs.

If your friend has a good backup, hopefully a clone of your system before you had issues, an Erase and Install may also rid you of this issue. But, beware! You will lose everything on the drive with this procedure. Let us know if you need help with that!

Good Luck! DALE

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Answer 2

pythonkid94 Author

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Feb 1, 2011 9:06 AM in response to Dale Weisshaar

Thanks for the reply 🙂

I found out that the screen light is dead, and there is something wrong with the hard drive.

Disk Utility's disk repair (on the same OS this time) reported "invalid sibling link, invalid map node", and when I started the computer in verbose mode, it kept on displaying "disk0s3 I/O error".

So now I will have to either spend the money for DiskWarrior, or for having a data recovery company recover the data.

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Answer 3

Feb 1, 2011 10:10 PM in response to pythonkid94

DiskWarrior is way cheaper then a data recovery company. That can get in the thousands.

If DW can't repair it, and it should be able to, there is the following.

You could try the free demo of Data Rescue 3.

DALE

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Answer 4

pythonkid94 Author

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Feb 3, 2011 10:16 AM in response to Dale Weisshaar

Would I risk loosing data with DiskWarrior? The following is from a data recovery website.

"Running so-called "Data Recovery Software" can increase and spread media damage in your hard disk grinding off magnetic subsurface that CONTAINS DATA and information needed to recover the data from the failing hard drive."

Are they only talking about mechanically damaged hard drives?

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Answer 5

Feb 4, 2011 1:36 PM in response to pythonkid94

pythonkid94 wrote:
Would I risk loosing data with DiskWarrior?

In my experience with DW I have lost small pieces of data that were too corrupt for DW to repair. It turned out to be stuff I didn't care about each time.

It usually repairs everything though. It's an incredible piece of software.

The following is from a data recovery website.

"Running so-called "Data Recovery Software" can increase and spread media damage in your hard disk grinding off magnetic subsurface that CONTAINS DATA and information needed to recover the data from the failing hard drive."

Sounds like they are trying to sell you on their services over the cheaper Data Rescue to me.

Dale

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