Long story short, While waiting for a 40 gig laptop drive to arrive for my Power Color CLassic project, I figured I'd organize and tidy up the current 15 gig drive I had in my 6500, to use it in the meantime.
-Organized essential files.
-Deleted 4 or 5 gigs of garbage
-Norton'ed the drive to fix any and all errors.
And when I was back up and running, I was going t hrough a lot of my old MP3s. I noticed most of them skipping around a bit, so I booted the Norton CD again. Lo and behold, my drive was fragmented.
I've never defragged any drive I've ever had in my life because fragmentation never gave me problems, no matter how bad. I figured I might as well give it a shot... I disregarded the alert that warned to backup important data, figuring "People do this all the time, I'm not worried". It sits and goes to work... then something goes wrong at 99.9% completion
Upon restart, the drive is unresponsive... Load norton disc, I get the standard Mac OS "this disk is unreadable by this macintosh, do you want to initialize?" and I figured something just went screwy... I clicked cancel, loaded Norton Disk Doctor... it didn't find the drive... so I clicked show missing disks... didnt see anything... I clicked "add custom disks" and found it in there, then found the data partition, and tried to mount it... it gave me some warning that the disk drivers were either missing or damaged and a crash could occur, but I proceeded anyway and still nothing mounted.
This is over 7 years of files... Yes I know I should have backed up, etc etc etc... but that's not the point. I'm just checking to see if anyone thinks there are any other options I can try. Neither norton or drive setup can re-do the drivers, nothing will mount the drive. I'm trying UnErase right now, and after 2+ hours, it seems to find about 40,000 some-odd files, of which most are recoverable now onto the new drive I have... But I'd still love to see if I can get this drive back up and going in SOME capacity. Other than normal files, I have things from WAY back in the late 80's that used to run on System 6 like some wicked old games, and all the files to a once fully functional Talking Moose version 3. I dont think the defragg really killed anything totally, since so many files are recoverable... but would this maybe be a job for Drive Savers? and at that, do they have any issues with pirated stuff or porn or things like that (come on, we're all human)
So you've pulled it out of a 6500, and it's partitioned, so one partition has OS 9 probably, and the other partition has only data, right?
First thing, I will do a long aside about Norton Utilities. There are many who will swear to the heavens against Norton Utilities and say you should never ever use it. I've not reached that point myself, but I am very wary of Norton and use it very carefully and don't rely on it, and never use it from the CD, but rather install it on a "Fixit" partition system. Norton Disk Doctor has solved quite a few problems for me, so I still go to it on rare occasions, but usually only after having tried Disk Utility (X), or Disk First Aid (OS 9), and DiskWarrior first. The biggest bone against Norton is Filesaver, and basically what I do with my Norton is very meticulously emasculate Filesaver as completely as possible from my harddrive after installing Norton. Basically, I do a search for "filesaver," "NFS," and "Norton FS" and trash and delete everything that turns up. Even then, it's very very difficult to install Norton without Filesaver almost immediately creating its notorious hidden files on each partition of your harddrive. I've accomplished it a couple of times, but am not sure exactly how I did it because it's been hard to repeat success. Instead, I've resorted to using Carbon Copy Cloner to copy entire harddrives, including classic systems and purely data partitions over to another harddrive or partition and deleting the Filesaver hidden files through the CCC process. In OS 9 you can simply use Norton's own Fast Find and do the same search for Filesaver files, and when the Norton FS index, etc. turn up in Fast Find, you go to File>Move to trash, and when you've got your collection of those hidden files in the trash, what you have to do to delete them is throw some other kind of non-hidden file in the trash and then empty the trash and the hidden files go out the door with the non-hidden. The hidden files won't empty from the trash on their own.
DiskWarrior is the utility you want to rely on instead of Norton, and in OS 9, Techtool is also useful. The one thing that Norton seems to do better than the others is defragment and optimize, which you've now found is an important routine for OS 9 harddrives. You don't need to defrag and optimize OS X systems because X does it on its own, and actually defragging is a very strenuous procedure for harddrive mechanisms and can, on old nearing-death harddrives, actually burn out the mechanisms. So, in your OS 9 drive, you would have probably avoided your current problem if you had been routinely defragging all along, especially with large data files like photoshop files and video and MP3's. I say all this from experience. I once helped a friend get her huge collection of photoshop files off her heavily fragmented harddrive, and it took all night, moving one file at a time to a clean partition with many crashes along the way. We finished around 6am.
My suggestion at this point would be to abandon Norton and move the harddrive to another computer where it can be hooked up as a slave and see if you can recover anything that way using another system. You might try DiskWarrior, but at your point, even that can be risky because DiskWarrior might recover your volume but you may loose many files along the way. Like I say, this is from my experience, and maybe someone else has better advice which I'd love to hear.
I do truly appreciate the advice, but I'm one of those people who does swear by norton... it's not that I haven't tried other utilities, it's that Norton is the only thing that can see my data in ANY capacity at this point.
It wasn't "partitioned" per se, but there's the standard data/os9/hfs+ partition, then all the other little invisible partitions with the hard drive drivers themselves and stuff.. the HFS+ partition couldnt be mounted or viewed from within OS 9 itself, and Norton couldn't even mount it, but UnErase was able to see nearly all the files on it.. I left it running overnight, and most things seem to have been recovered but some are damaged and dont work. I wish I could really explain what happened, or I wish my problem wasn't so obscure/unique because this is really frustrating. The hard drive WAS pretty old, so there's a good chance the defrag could certainly have burned something out... but I've also never had a hard drive die on me either; so for this to be a week of "firsts" it's not much fun.
I've got some other things to try, so I've not given up hope yet... I WILL say I know where you're coming from with Filesaver and everything. I've never once actually INSTALLED Norton on a hard drive, I just always use Norton Disk Doctor from the Norton CD itself. Filesaver is almost more of a nuisance than a help.
After I go through everything that was recovered, Im either going to do a second recover, or I'm going to try and RE-defrag and see if it may somehow fix what wasnt finished the first time (Ive had weird problems resolved after doing the last thing you'd think might work). If anyone else has any ideas, it would be greatly appreciated... and HC, thanks for mentioning DiskWarrior, though... if it's another tool in the fight to keep an old Mac healthy, I'll scope it out. I'm surprised I've never heard of it before.
just to add a little bit, it looks like the disk drivers have been killed... Drive Setup doesnt want to let me update the drivers, and I cant seem to find any other program to let me do it... in the middle of running Norton Disk Doctor, it says it needs to mount the disk, but couldnt because the drivers were messed up.
are there any other utilities out there that might help?