Subject: Re: Restore Disk Question

From: chris <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu Jun 19 17:12:53 2003

>I have a MAC Performa 550.  Somehow my son has crashed the hard drive to the
>point where the computer no longer thinks there is a hard drive.
>
>Does the recovery CD allow you to boot off the CD?  I have a
>utilities diskette but it won't restore off the backup diskettes since the
>computer thinks there is no hard drive any longer.

The first thing is to get the machine booted with anything that has Disk 
First Aid and Drive Setup on it (Disk Tools floppy, or a bootable CD). To 
boot from the CD, put the CD in and hold down the C on the keyboard then 
turn on the computer and keep holding C until it starts to boot. (make 
sure caps lock isn't on as it only works with a lowercase C)

Then run Drive Setup and see if it sees the hard drive, if not, the drive 
itself is toast, get a new drive. If it does see it, update the driver 
(its in the menus). After updating the driver, reboot using your boot 
disk NOT the hard drive. After the reboot, run Disk First Aid and attempt 
a Repair on the hard drive.

After that, the drive still may or may not be bootable. If it still is 
not bootable, try reinstalling the OS, that should restore it to bootable 
state.

-chris
<http://www.mythtech.net>