Seventhfury Studios Blog

 I recently purchased Max OS X Leopard for both of my Macs, I have a G4 PowerMac and a Macbook Pro. A couple of weeks back, one of the hard drives in my G4 PowerMac crashed, but luckily I was able to recover the data using DiskWarrior, which was amazing. 

Needless to say, I was scared of losing some of my valuable files and information. 

After running for eight days straight, DiskWarrior allowed me to pull all of my info from the crashed hard drive and then I buried the thing in the backyard. R.I.P.

My first thought after all of this happened was that I should have been using Leopard’s Time Machine feature to constantly back up my files, so I went down to the Apple store and grabbed a Family Pack to put on my machines. I also grabbed a 1TB FreeAgent XTreme from Best Buy, which has a Firewire 400 port and is pretty rad. 

I got home and set everything up, installed Leopard on both machines, and all was good in the world. Or so I thought. 

Although most everything went well with the update, I soon realized there were a couple of things that were very wrong, one on each computer. I noticed the error on my G4 first, as I was trying to reinstall all of my applications to get back up and running. The problem is that my disc drive wasn’t mounting any discs that I was putting in, so after much searching online and many tests and upgrades of firmware I realized that the poor thing was probably shot from running DiskWarrior for 8 days as well as installing the new OS X.

I needed to get up and running as soon as I could and I didn’t have the car at home that day (wife had it). So, what other options did I have? I did some searching on the net and found something that saved my sanity that day: Macworld’s article on how to borrow an optical drive from another Mac using a Firewire cable. Using this method, I was able to install my entire system again using my MacBook Pro’s optical drive as the source of the install. This was especially helpful in helping me get my Adobe Creative Suite back up and running, because by golly I had work to do!

So how did I get my optical drive back up and running in my G4 PowerMac? Read Mac Issues, Part 2: Installing a New Optical Drive in a G4 PowerMac.