Troubleshooting the Apple Hard Drive updater (#4): Recovering your disk; Terminal can "see" damaged drive; more
Troubleshooting the Apple Hard Drive updater (#4): Recovering your disk; Terminal can "see" damaged drive; more
Possible drive recovery procedure If you applied Apple's hard drive updater and are now left with a defunct drive, this procedure may help you regain use of the hard disk, though you will lose any data that was previously stored there.
If you have a Wintel machine handy, or can get your hands on one, remove the drive from the Mac and install it as a slave drive in the Wintel system. Use the Wintel machine's Setup utility in CMOS to recognize that the drive is physically connected and parameters set. Use "fdisk" to remove all partitions from the drive and then use the same utility to setup a Primary DOS partition on the now totally erased drive. You should either download the drive manufacturer's setup utility, such as Maxblast for Maxtor drives, and use this utility to format and initialize the drive. You can now remove the drive from the Wintel machine. Reinstall it in the Mac and restart from the System CD or other drive and use the Mac's "Disk Utility" to set up the drive to suit your needs or requirements.
So far, we have had no reports of success using either Data Rescue or VirtualLab to recover data from these disks.
Please give us your insight on this procedure if you've tried it.
Terminal can "see" damaged drive Sebastiaan van Stijn notes that drives destroyed by this firmware update can still be "discovered" by the Terminal, and offers the following observations:- the 'block device description file' for the drive is found in the 'dev' directory ('drive1')
- the 'character device description file' is there rdisk1, but no partition information (rdisk1s0 etc)
- If I try pdisk, I get the following results: pdisk: can't open file 'disk1' (Device not configured)
Firmware prompt at startup, solution After applying the hard drive updater, some users are presented with an open-firmware prompt at startup, with the options to either continue booting or shut down the computer. Choosing to continue booting, via the command "mac-boot" will result in a blinking question mark, indicating that no startup drive can be found.
We experienced this issue in-house, and were able to temporarily work around it by holding down the option key at startup and selecting the still-viable Mac OS X startup volume.
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