A Cardiologist with a broken "apple"

I am thinking that will the loss of data and the fact the Mac only sees one of your hard drives, that the other HD bit the dust (kicked the bucket, etc, etc)

Find your OS X Tiger DVD. Pop it in the machine, restart it, holding the C button down on the keyboard. This will boot to the DVD. Run Disk Utility from the DVD. Verify the Disk using D.U. - see if they both show up, and if one of them (or both) fail the SMART test.

iSMH

If the problem started with the installation of the Canon scanner there is likely some software that was installed that is creating problems.

You should be able to start with the shift key held down which will prevent any third party in the Start up Items preference from being loaded. Of course this is only if you can get the computer to acknowledge the existence of your main boot drive. (I am a little confused as to whether or not you can actually get the computer to attempt to boot from this drive by your explanation).

You should also be able to insert your install disk into the computer and run Disk Utilities from the install disk. If you have the Tiger disk, use it as there are improvements to Disk Utility in the 10.4 operating system. Place the install disk into the computer, select Restart from the menu and after the computer screen goes blank, press the c key to boot from the install disk. An installer window will appear. Quit the installer and go up to the menu at the top of the screen and open Disk Utility.

Repair the Tiger installation first then repair the permissions. If the utility says that it cannot repair the hard drive then you will either have to reinstall or purchase a utility like Disk Warrior. If the Repair said that modifications were made, run it again until it reports that all is well.

Assuming that all goes well with the Repair,you should also have the ability to select a startup disk from the install cd/dvd. Select the Tiger hard drive and boot with the shift key held down to shut off start up items. When/if you get to your desktop open Preferences and select Accounts. Open your account and put a minus sign (turn off ) any Canon startup items and reboot.

Report back any progress.

They should all be on the Powermac G4 DVD(s) that came with the machine.

Other apps, you will have to reload one-by-one (Office, iLife, etc)

You have a couple of options.

The restore disks have many of the applications for your mac including (if you need it) the system 9 folder for Classic and booting into 9 (if your mac can do that). They are available from Apple and I have seen the price from free (from a sympathetic person at an Apple Store) to $60 from Apple. The 9 folder can be dragged from a cloned disk. The other applications on the restore disk should be installed from the restore disk.

Another alternative is to use a clone with your applications, clone it back to the fixed hard drive, and use the Tiger install disk to do an archive and install on the clone of the clone. I'm not real fond of doing this because the chance of accumulated errors in an old system finding their way into a new system are increased.

Lastly, you could purchase iLife which has most of the restore applications plus more and they are updated. You would not get the 9 folder this way but if it is on the clone then just use the cloned 9 folder to restore that function.

Does this help?

Something else to consider is that it may be time to purchase a new hard drive and use the patched/fixed old hard drive for backup or non essential files.

There are several sales on storage right now

http://dealmac.com/categories/Computer/Storage/Hard-Drives/IDE-Hard-Drives/57.ht ml

Everyone you will talk to will tell you which hard drive maker is best. I have had problems with all of them so my feeling is that it is best to have several and keep backups as fresh as possible rotating through the hard drives. I also backup critical files to dvd.

Currently my mac has 2 Seagates and a Western Digital but the most recent purchase I have made was a Maxtor(for another mac I have). My firewire drive is a Hitachi so you can see that I have little preference. All of them work fine. Any of them could fail at any time. Just be ready for the failure when it happens.

Well, I was sort of hoping to avoid that one since you have already had some bad luck.

There is a good utility for recovering files called Data Rescue.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/1133

You can download a free trial which is the full version but limited to recovery of one file. To get the rest requires paying the $100 to buy it. But at least you would find out if it works for you at no cost.

The reason for my hesitance is that for it to do the best job you shouldn't run other recovery programs on the files. You jumped in with TechTool pretty early on and I was hoping that it would do a better job. You can still try Data Rescue and hopefully there is no more damage done than what you started with. Read the documentation before starting. It does a good job of explaining what probably happened, how the files are cataloged on the hard drive and what Data Rescue will attempt to do.

It is also useful to read the reviews that were given by others who used this program.

Note: I have never had the cause to use Data Rescue. Situations like yours were either fixed by Disk Warrior. The times I tried to use Data Rescue the problems were due to mechanical problems with the drives that I had to repair to get my data. Others on this forum have had success with Data Rescue when other utilities failed so I'm passing it along.

Good Luck and let me know how it goes.

I have 3 hard drives in my mdd, each can boot this computer. One thing that macs have always done well is manage multiple sources of startup.

Despite what may or may not happen with human clones, hard drive cloning is good! Use it. It is your friend. I regularly test out questionable computer practices on a clone. If it works on a clone then I use it for my main system. Clones are un matched if your main drive goes down. Programs like SuperDuper can be set to automatically do incremental backups of your main system keeping you up to date at all times.

The best utility that I use on a somewhat regular basis is AppleJack. It is run from command line and can seem intimidating because it is all command line but it is really great.

http://applejack.sourceforge.net/

Turning off your mac is not necessary if it sleeps properly. I turn my mac on in the morning and leave it on till the end of the day or sometimes till the next day. With everything running you will use about 140 watts of power, deep sleep about 12 watts, and off 7 watts. Yup, it uses 7 watts when off to keep certain circuits alive.

Lastly, most of what we pass along on these forums is learned the hard way (like your experience) and by sharing our learned experiences. The whole experience base then becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

Rajiv,
I too have had some recent problems with my MDD, see:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=288715&tstart=0
As you can see Discwarrior was the remedy. I am only mentioning this because of your disappointment with Techtool Pro. I was a bit dubious about using a repair utility because of bad experiences with a windoze machine. However Discwarrior was amazing! It does a large numer of tests and then creates a virtual copy of your system and allows you to compare the changes it will make from the original. If and when you are happy with the changes you then tell it to re-write your system. For me, as someone who has always been meticulous about running maintainance tasks and other housekeeping utilities, I was horrified with the number of errors that were reported. It might not help you now but it sure is an essential tool for any Mac user. It will also run a monitoring proceedure that keeps you informed of any possible upcoming problems with your system. Worth every penny!
Usual disclaimers apply, I am just a happy customer!

G4 867 MDD Mac OS X (10.3.9) Extra 120Gb HD, 1.75Gb SDRAM LG 4163B Superdrive