No problem. If you're hearing unusual noises from a hard drive -- assuming you have a good feel for what "usual" noises sound like -- that's a terrible sign. Time to replace it, whether it's completely failed already or not. If you've got any really crucial data on it, you can try Drivesavers, but it'll cost you a pretty penny.

I might not be understanding you here, but it seems as if you have a slight misunderstanding of what tools you have available. Don't worry about the OS9 Utilities disk, you don't need that. The OSX Disk Utility program is actually on the OSX install CD and IS available when you boot your computer with it. So instead of proceeding with the install, you can look under your (File?) menu and launch Disk Utilities from there.

Yeah, that disk tool does not recognize anything other than the CD DVD drive. :mad:

I'm fairly sure this is because the volume contained on it is not mounted. .. the only thing left to try, besides :eek: dropping it down a flight of stairs, it seams is to try and manually mount the device using a terminal.

Dunno if anyone could help me with a command, or point me in the right direction for reference. :o

You may use the command line tool 'diskutil' from a terminal session. Unfortunately you have a boot-strap problem; you need a bootable system to run Terminal in.

I would suggest connecting your laptop to another Mac with a firewire cable, booting the laptop into Target Disk Mode, and attempting to mount it that way. You can simply type 'diskutil' at the command line to get a list of possible options.

This won't do anything that the system itself hasn't tried generally, but you can have the satisfaction of banging on it yourself.

If your drive spins, there is a good chance that other disk utility programs will be able to get the data off of it. I have had good luck with Data Rescue X myself, though Disk Warrior seems to be the program of choice around here. These will often work even when the system can't mount the drive.

Good luck!

Jono, you seem a little obsessed with getting the volume to "mount", and we can all assure you that if your Mac isn't automatically mounting the volume it's because there's a problem with it. :) Your Mac will refuse to mount the volume until repairs are made, if that's even possible.

Boot from your OS X cd again and open Disk Utility. It doesn't just look for volumes (which are the logical segments of disks). It takes a look at the IDE and SCSI buses and shows you the physical storage devices that are available. Whether it can actually find any readable volumes on them is irrelevant.

What this means is that if you launch Disk Utility, in the list on the left you should see something like '58.2 GB IBM 7Y250P0' with a little hard drive icon. If you don't see anything with a hard drive icon next to it that matches your internal drive, it means the physical device isn't even talking to the computer. There's no point in trying to find some way of accessing it with the command line, because the drive is completely dead. You almost certainly have to replace it, and only someone like DriveSavers has any possibility of getting data off it.

Now, if the internal hard drive does show up in the list, does it have anything listed under it? It should show either the name of your missing volume (like 'Macintosh HD'), or something like 'disk2s3'. If it doesn't show any of those things, it either means the device is responding but not really working properly (bad hardware), or the partition table is destroyed (a software problem). There's no way to tell the difference until you try something like DiskWarrior or Data Rescue X. If they can locate the device and read data off it, you've still got a chance. If they can't, you 100% need to replace the hard drive, and the data is gone unless you pay DriveSavers a ton of money to try to recover it.

I hate to be a big downer, but you really seem to have a great deal of faith in the power of the command line, and I don't think it's going to get you much of anywhere. :(

In my experience, this isn't entirely true, Data Rescue X was able to 'see' a drive that wouldn't list in any of the other tools I threw at it, Disk Utility or the 'diskutil' command line program. How it accessed it and recovered the data is beyond me, but from what I have read and experienced, if the drive spins, you can get something off of it. ;)

I did have to put the drive in question into another computer that had a bootable system of course...

That's cool, I've never been that fortunate. Do you think Target Disk Mode would work for that functionality, or would having the IDE-Firewire bridge prevent Data Rescue from getting to the drive?

I couldn't answer that authoritatively as I have only used this when pulling out the drive and installing it inside my G4 tower. I should think it would work fine, though you could check that out on the website. Maybe someone else can chime in if they have actually pulled that off?