People say apples are hard to crash. i dissagre. Today around 5, i was listening to iTunes and chating on AIM. at the same time that i recived a message and that annoying noise played, the current song played a certain note. the combination of the 2 crashed my computer. This is normal for me, happens nearly once a month or so, and i've been meaning to send in a bug report. Well, guess it's a bit too late now!

I rebooted and tried to get on AIM again. Application unexpected quit. Tried surfing the web. Same effect. Tried to boot up classic. could do it. I then went over to Disk Utility. what happened? it worked. it started repairing my computer. and crashed.

My computer was too badly ****ed to fix itself. being that i am in the middle of nowhere, i had no alternatives but to erase the hard drive and reinstall OS X.

I lost over 5 gigs of porn and 10 gigs of music. 4 gigs of apps i hardly ever use, 1 gig of pirated games. and some other stuff.

Do not expect to see me online for a while. i will be busy re-d/ling what was lost. first: i must install classic just to have it. then. The porn.

Why didn't you boot up under your system CDs and ran Disk Utility from there to repair it? At the very least you could've done an archive and install, without having to reformat your entire HD. It would've simply reinstalled all the system components.

/me shakes his head.

I booted under my system CDs and tried Disk Utility from there, still no luck. As for the archive and install, i didn't think about it. Besides, this way i can finaly get all of my dad's music off here that he NEVER listens to. He had like twice as much as i do. the sad part? he wouldn't let me delete the MP3s even though he has all the CDs upstairs

I'm just here to laugh at you...don't mind me...I'm not really in the mac forum again... >.>

i dont mind. A clean HD is a good HD. i've known this thing was corrupted for almost 3 years

then why didn't you fix it back then?

My brother did a format of his old hard drive in the powerbook.

Mmmmm, dead zones.

get this. i had to wipe the HD 3 times before i could get OS 9.2 to install again. 3 times!!!!! evne though i had "install OS9 drivers" checked every time. it was that badly hurt.

Sounds like you fucked up your hard drive.

Sam, always boot from CD and restore the system--works every time.

Well, Sam, I know how you feel. Before I had a CD burner and a zip drive, I always lost everything everytime I formatted the hard drive. Couldn't you burn CDs?

I probably could have, but what's the point?> i didn't use most of the shit, and if i do need it at some time, i can re d/l it

hmm... i have two computers (an iMac and a PBook) and although i never had severe problems (except those i created almost willingly), i know i can hook those two up and have a hope to save data.

on a sidenote: hard drives are not indestructible. my one performa once needed a new one because he didn't recognize it as startup disk anymore.

but if you need some data really badly from your old disk, i suppose you know there are hideously expensive data retrieval companies :)

I also had a big problem before some years with an iMac G3. Disk Utility always said the drive has non repairable errors, those went more, tried to repair with norton and stuff, but no success, so I ignored it. Since one day suddenly it made poof, and the drive could not be mounted anymore. And absolutely nothing could be restored with any app (except some pictures). The bad thing was, that happend when a friend visited me for a programming session (he came from another country a few days)...

Since then never had any problems (had a cube and now an iMac 17" for 1 and a half year now). Had some system freezes (when plugged out the boot drive, or the new freeze bug), but nothing serouis. Have still the same system from Nov 2002 (of course all updates, but never-ever a re-install) and it runs stable and quick. I put it on an external LaCie firewire Disk, to run faster.

I am really happy with Apple and the System (I especially love the screen), but a little more 3D gaming power would have been fine. At least it could have 64 MB VRAM or a better graphics card. Because I want pure power and powerful (upgradeable?) graphics this time I'll get a Dual G5 as soon as a new revision is here! I want a Radeon 9600/9700 with 128MB at least.

just my little story ;-D
greetings,
stuepfnick

I've got an original iMac G4, bought as a preorder and I've yet to have to erase the hard drive and I've never had to reinstall anything.

Now... Anyone remember the Classic utility that formatted HFS+ hard drives into .5k blocks instead of the standard 2k? I partitioned the internal 60 gig drive into three equal sizes and formatted them with that utility (I think it came from Alsoft).

Installed X onto the first partition, my Classic setup is on the second and the third is gamespace. I have an external 80 gig maxtor FW drive partitioned into four spaces for porn, music, etc and backups.

Now, the only main problem I have is fragmentation. At least once a month I run disk utility on all the drives and also repair permissions. Then I run Disk Doctor on and Speed Disk on all the drives except the boot drive. THEN I boot into classic and run Disk First Aid, Norton Disk Doctor and Speed Disk on the OSX boot partition. Other than for this purpose, I haven't used OS9 for over a year and a half.

This usually takes a full day.

The only problem I have is that once a week or so my mac crashes (processor pegs, unable to quit/force quit apps, finder won't relaunch, spinning wheel of death). I THINK that's because I've just upgraded my OS all the way back from what, 10.0 or 10.1? That's a lot of 10.1.x, 10.2.x and 10.3.x intermittent updates, not to mention the major upgrades to panther/jaguar. However, these crashes seem to occur most often when I'm abusing Safari but opening a TON of pages (and leaving Safari on for week with all of these pages) and when running LimeWire.

I'm too lazy to start over.

Now for backups. Dude, I have no pity for people who lose -everything-. Someone in another thread said to skimp and not get a Superdrive. You are a FOOL!

I have 140 gigs of space on my mac - 120 of it used to be full. Do you know how many CDs it would take me to back all that up? Something like 200 discs. Or two dozen DVDs.

I'm anal though... When I back up, I put two copies of everything on the disc. One uncompressed version and one compressed sitx format with maximum recovery redundancy. I've never lost a file due to disc error. Since I have that redundancy, I can delete those files off my drive and I don't worry about losing them.

I'm seriously considering this setup: A new 200 gig firewire drive. Then I can software RAID stripe and mirror them and then using a software mirror so I can backup the internal drive between the two externals. That would give me roughly two hundred gigs of usable space and a near impenetrable backup system.

I have an old Beige G3 server in storage, though. I may network it in and use it for backups.

0.5 k blocks really is no fun at all! Normal are 4k or 8k blocks. 4k is space savier, but 8k is still faster and makes sense for video drives, etc. With this block size you won't need defragmenting, because OS X does this with small files automatically and with big files it won't help to speed up stuff.

And for backups: Sure I made backups of the important stuff... but when you meet with someone for coding convention, who's here only for 5 days and you need 3 days for re-installing everything, and updating the code with the modifications done since the last backup (there even some days is lot of work) this is no fun at all. Because most time is lost then. An additional problem was all the internet access data was also stored on HD (recieved faxes via FaxStf) and i couldn't find the print-outs, and it was weekend, so we even not got to the internet before the 3rd day. That really was horrible, and the absolutely worst possible point of time for such a data loss. ;-)

greetings,
Stuepfnick

Yea, all those G3 iMacs are about on their last legs these days. I know a girl whose power-supply died a month ago. She was working on a paper, needless to say, she was not happy. And since it was a hardware problem, there wasn't much I could do. Crying ensued. I felt bad.
Moral of the story, if the hardware is that old, make sure to either upgrade it, or backup frequently.

Heh. Every school in my city is running off G3 imacs with OS 8.6

Public schools aren't exactly known for being on the Cutting edge.

I have to say that Norton Disk Doctor always helped me. Even when the Apple support team said I had to format my HD I used Norton a couple times and it solved all problems....