Mac G4 Problem

[d!g!t@lTr@sh]

After opening a .rar file with the Unarchiver on my old mac G4@533Mhz, the system became unresponsive. It wasn't a KP for sure, the mouse was responding, but I could not do anything (force quit, etc ...). The hang was like the one where the hard disk is not responding and the task cannot proceed. At that point, I did a hard reboot, and got the HDD problems, making me unable to boot. Here's the issue

 

Upond checking the HDD on startup, the prompt gives the following:

 

...

Checking Catalog file

- Invalid sibling link (4, 15186)

Vollume check failed

...

 

after which, the machine halts the CPU and shuts down.

 

I tried to repair the HDD with diskutil from the install cd, but it fails as well . Is there anything I can do at this point to save/repair the startup partition?

[Synaesthesia]

I think the hard drive may be broken. Try reading the drive in another Mac or hackintosh. You may still be able to copy over your old files.

[wolfienuke]

I just had an issue with my MacBook failing to boot (? Folder icon during boot). The Disk checked out fine with Disk Utility and I was forced to repartition the disk, and re-install to fix the problem.

 

I tried to backup the entire disk before I partitioned the disk. There are a few ways to do this. If you have a large enough external drive, you can make a disk image of the entire drive (if possible - disk read errors might prevent this). At a minimum, you can copy over your Users folder to an external disk using Terminal. This is what I had to do. Just type this in Terminal.

cp -r /Volumes/*SourceDiskName*/Users/ /Volumes/*DestinationDiskName*/UsersBackup/

You can also attempt to copy the entire disk, but if you are going to re-install, usually the Users folder contains most of your important data.

[d!g!t@lTr@sh]

Thanks guys for the help. I was able to login in a single user mode. This tutorial did not help, however, but if you get similar error, I think checking the disk with that method is much better.