When my iBook's hard drive "crashed" a few days ago, I was able to boot up off of an external Firewire drive and run DiskTools on it. I wasn't able to repair the drive, but figured I'd come back later and try some other tools to see if I had more luck.
So, this morning, when I tried to boot up off of the external Firewire drive, I found my iBook refused to let me boot up. Strange, no?
It almost sounds like I have some sort of worm or virus, doesn't it? The weird part is I run Clam A/V and Little Snitch, which should let me know if I have such a beastie. They aren't perfect, of course, and it is theoretically possible I got hold of something new that didn't get picked up . . . but those are some pretty unusual odds.
And yet, when I try to come up with other explanations, they seem even more farfetched. The firmware doesn't "go bad" usually, and that would prevent it from booting on any drives-- not selectively fail.
I did manage to boot up from my CD-Rom/DVD drive with an old Live CD of Ubuntu. From there, I was able to look at my hard drive with "G-Parted" (a hard drive partitioning tool that is used in Ubuntu). It can "see" the hard drive, even though it isn't mounted, and it can tell me that there are three partitions in it. The first partition is marked as "unknown" and is sized at 128 MB, the second partition is undefined, and doesn't appear to have any real "size" to it, and the third partition is HFS+ and comes in just over 28 GB. That third partition is, theoretically, where all the data is-- except I can't get the drive to mount properly. It's not a big deal, because I've got most of the data backed up on my external hard drive-- minus some bookmarks I made for my home improvement project.
So why is the iBook suddenly refusing to boot from the external Firewire drive? Is this a clue to the original problem, or just the sign of a deteriorating computer?
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