By mr. (Murdoch) (217.39.40.131) on Tuesday, January 07, 2003 - 05:48 pm:

Greetings All,

somewhat off topic but needs must!

simply put, my system freezes on boot up when trying to mount a drive to the desktop. this will happen booting from CD (norton, apple) or from OS installed on another drive. if i disconnect the offending drive (internal) all boots fine.

a brief history - i'd been getting a volume bitmap error with the boot drive which norton would *fix* but then rediscover on shutdown scan (should've reformatted, but that's another story). it came to the crunch of (?) at startup and now whichever way i go in when the system gets to mounting the drive it'll freeze.

so i need to find a way of mounting that drive.

the disc is a rather old IBM DFHS type (1.4Gb i think) running in a ... wait for it ... power computing power tower pro 225 (it's my *other mac*), OS8.6.

i've posted over at MacFixIt and the Apple boards but so far it's no go. i'd dearly like to get my restrospect DAT catalogues off it at the very least (eggs and baskets spring to mind here) so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and fingers crossed.
murdoch

By Plotz (Plotz) (68.58.118.150) on Tuesday, January 07, 2003 - 07:40 pm:

Do you have Techtool Pro?

It has a utility that will just copy everything off of a volume into another volume you specifiy. Then you can sift through and pull out the files that survived.

I've used it on many occasions with drives that wouldn't mount. As long as the problem with your drive is a corrupted volume header...and not a crashed head...it should work.

By mr. (Murdoch) (217.39.40.131) on Tuesday, January 07, 2003 - 07:59 pm:

Hi Plotz,

i don't have Techtool Pro but if it'll do the job then i'll get it.

i still can't get over/around the *wall* of - if the drive's in, the system will freeze when it tries to mount it. doesn't even give me the old favourite "drive/volume not recognized" message which is usually recoverable with Norton.

could i plug it in after i've got the system up? or do i stand a good chance of frying the machine and myself? how long can the machine run without the fan as this needs to be out to get at the drives?

so many questions.

Thanks for the response.

By mr. (Murdoch) (217.39.159.78) on Wednesday, January 08, 2003 - 08:04 pm:

problem solved,

the CSOD command was the pointer but plugging the power to the drive in AFTER the system was up was the solution. Norton Volume Recover did the rest.

Hoorah!