Time machine
my 2007 Mac mini cannot be fixed or diagnosed by the two geniuses who have tried to help me.there seems to be a problem with booting and reading the hard drive in some way although the diagnostics they ran came out okay
Ultimately we took the step of formatting the C drive because the genius could not find a problem and thought this might well do the trick
everything seem to reinstall okay- he did check the back up status which was recent.
The next step was to extract data from my back up but now it seems like the Iomega drive which was connected by FireWire to my mini is not 'visible' as a volume when I boot the mini, or indeed when I plugged the drive into a MacBook from work to check that time machine does have my data safe
Now I'm pretty dismayed and depressed as you can imagine as it's all about the data !
iPhoto '08, Mac OS X (10.6.8), mac mini