Alright got a friends Powerbook G4 that wouldn't boot up. Just got to the grey screen, sometimes with the apple, and just got stuck there. I booted up from a 10.3.9 disc and tried to repair permissions. Low and behold, SMART status: Failing.

There's some data on there that needs recovering, so just curious as to what my options are at this point in that regard.

i'd say to put the drive in another machine and hope it still works enough to get your files off of it

if the OS cant get to it, then try using spinrite or something to read the sectors raw and get as much back as it can


what's causing smart to fail? if it's the control board, then your only option might be to send it out and have the platters removed and put in another case

Try target disk mode. connect it to a different make via firewire cable. hold down T when it boots..see if it pops up on the 'host' computer as a hard drive

Hm, no firewire cables available.

USB work?

nope. firewire only

Oh I just had a thought.... live-cd... should be able boot from that, and hopefully get network going and transfer files that way.

Ouch... even live cd couldn't read the HDD. It's toast I think.

Smart should warn you usually a month before the harddisk finally fails. It's weird that it starts to warn you when it's almost already 100% broken.(or did your friend just ignored the warnings smart gave?) Anyway i agree with quantums advice. You can even put it in a windows machine if you download transmac.

Not sure. I don't think smart even gave any warnings.

Try to freeze it.

freezing only works on moofed bearings, but i guess it's worth a try (unless you wanna pay a grand for a data recovery company to look at it - in that case just pack it up and DON'T TOUCH IT.)