Can't startup with my internal drive

Question

Can't startup with my internal drive

One morning my Mac Mini would not startup, it would try to start up but after about 2 minutes the Apple would turn to the circle with a diagonal line through it. Fortunately I had installed Snow Leopard on my external Firewire 800 drive so I could startup from that drive. My internal drive now will not mount when starting from my external drive until I rebuild the drive using Drive Genesis and then run Volume Structures with Tech Tool V5.0. No other combination of utilities seems to work to make it mount. Not sure if that would makes sense to anyone that might know what is wrong and how to fix it so I could startup from my internal drive.

I have also tried to reinstall Snow Leopard but when starting from the install DVD the internal drive does not show up as an option for installation. I am trying to startup at least one last time from my internal drive since I have a Filemaker Pro 7 database which I have forgotten the password for but when starting up from my internal drive it opens since the password is stored in Snow Leopard. I have found programs using Windows to change or extract the FM7 password but I am trying not to spend the $30 to $40 for a program I will only use once.

Any ideas on how I might fix this would be greatly appreciated.

Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 8 gb RAM

Posted on Mar 25, 2012 6:03 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

X423424X

Level 6

14,265 points

Mar 25, 2012 6:46 PM in response to Jeffrey Bivans

If Disk Utility can't see it I think the drive is physically failing and needs to be replaced.

DiskWarrior might be able to get it so Disk Utility can see it again. Bit if were me I wouldn't trust the drive any more.

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Answer 2

Mar 25, 2012 8:06 PM in response to X423424X

Yes, I was thinking that is the problem too, but being that the drive is just a bit over 2 years old I was hoping it wasn't. I also hate buying the new version of DiskWarrior as I have it from my old PowerPC days but might be a good investment. My plans was/is to replace the drive with either a 7200 rpm drive or an SSD drive. Just funds are not exactly flowing at the moment so hoped to hold off on that. The optical drive seems to be shot too. My old Blue & White is still working after 13 years and I guess I just expected more that 2 years+ from an Apple computer these days. But thanks for the input.

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Answer 3

X423424X

Level 6

14,265 points

Mar 25, 2012 8:18 PM in response to Jeffrey Bivans

My old Blue & White is still working after 13 years and I guess I just expected more that 2 years+ from an Apple computer these days.

Heh 😀 You got one of them too. Mine is just about as old and keeps chugging along year in and year out. I think the difference between those made then and now is probably most of those weren't made in China. But in fairness to apple, they don't make the drives. Drives do fail. That's why everyone should have backups.

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Answer 4

fane_j

Level 4

3,697 points

Mar 25, 2012 10:26 PM in response to Jeffrey Bivans

Jeffrey Bivans wrote:

My internal drive now will not mount when starting from my external drive until I rebuild the drive using Drive Genesis and then run Volume Structures with Tech Tool V5.0.

That sounds dubious to me; but, anyway, the solution is obvious. Reformat the internal drive and restore its contents from backup. Simple, ain't it?… Of course, you do have a backup, right?…

If, by some impossibly remote chance, you don't have a backup, then you get an ext'l drive and, as soon as you manage to mount the int'l drive, back it up, then reformat, etc.

While booting from the ext'l drive, and assuming the password you need is stored in the respective user account keychain, you could try adding the respective keychain to the current user account keychain.

Keychain Access > File > Add Keychain…

The keychain is, of course <~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain>. I don't know if it will work, but it's worth a try.

But the data may be corrupt. The drive may fail at any moment. Restoring from backup seems to me the only sound solution.

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Answer 5

Mar 26, 2012 7:35 AM in response to fane_j

Great idea! Can't believe I didn't think of that myself because while I did not have a complete backup of everything I did have backups of scattered around on drives and did copy so,e preferences from the Mac Mini.

I tried to copy the keychain file from the internal drive after making a copy of the keychain of the external drive, as well, just in case the Mac Mini's keychain is corrupt. Anyway, thanks for the input.

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Answer 6

Mar 26, 2012 7:49 AM in response to fane_j

IT WORKED! Thank you sooooo much for the idea!!!

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