Help! Recovering HD + lost partition

C

Chewie

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Ok heres how it all began. I booted from Drive 10 1.1.2 CD to better optimise my OS X 10.2.3 partition but when I ran the Optimise tool (defrag) it was taking for ever so I stopped operation which crashed the app. Restarted, then my System partition wouldnt boot anymore. So I started up from OS 9 disc with Norton Utilities 5 (I dont have 6 on CD) and tried to repair/recover it. But then again it didnt work so I was ready to format the X partition and reinstall 10.2 but I discover with Disk Utility that now other partitions have disapeared (1 X + 1 OS9 and 3 for storage), all I have left is my HD 37 gig and 1 partition of 3 gig (OS X) if I erase it offers to do the whole disk, 37gig which I dont want. So I tried booting from OS9 CD again and it wouldnt work, if I take out the HD I can boot no prob... Is there a way to recover my other partitions !? Or maybe I can format only a 3gig (my old X partition) and hope it wont erase my other partitions to be able to work from 10.2 ?

Help really appreciated, I cant afford losing 30gig of data which I wont be able to replace again...

G4 400mhz PCI Radeon 320Mb ram
 
what defragging utility did you use? if you were using norton, you are in bad shape if you quit in the middle. the others should have been safe to quit thru the app's gui. you are definitly going to need a good up to date repair utility to stand any chance at recovery i think. i suggest Diskwarrior and Plus Optimizer (for defragging). avoid norton. it can cause more problems than it solves.
 
Stuff like that scares me away from defragging my X partition. I know I used Norton 6 to mount my drive when it bombed, copied my data to another partition on another drive then reformated the bombed drive. Good luck
 
I was using Drive10's built-in optimise tool when it crashed. Well crashed made OS X partition unbootable but did not affect other partitions its only after trying several utilities (mainly norton) that my other partitions disapeared, like you said just made things worse... Now I have no possibility of booting into a system, only OS X.2 CD which let me format the whole HD. If I could have access to my OS 9 partition I could run Disk Warrior. What I found really wierd is that I CANT BOOT from OS 9 CD anymore, only X ! I will try DataRescue but unless they give me a .dmg ready to be burnt into a bootable CD I dont see how I can use it (Luckly I have my pc to be able to write here)
 
Defragging itself or perhaps the crash only affected the boot volume, which was not that bad, actually I should have formated right away. The problem was trying to recover that partition thats when things got out of control...

Is it worth trying fsck -y command ? when I hit Command + S it will work only if I boot from CD and will work on CD only, how can I specify which volume to check !?

I have no answer from data rescue website in my e-mail and I tried dling again but theres an error, anywhere else I can get it ? Here's my e-mail : chewy.the.wookie if you can send it to me.
 
I still can't figure why the mac won't boot from an OS 9 CD when the HD is connected... Is there a key combo to ignore the HD and force the comp to start from CD ??
 
The only Key to press to boot from a CD is the letter "C" Try resetting PRAM (hold OPT-CMD-P-R when booting), continue to hold through several beeps, then hold the C down assuming a bootable CD in the drive. Good Luck!
 
Tried zapping pram serveral times but no progress. Could the problem come from the fact I'm trying to boot 9.1 with the HD which has corrupted X.2, and something on the drive will not let me start from that system ? Maybe I need 9.2 to allow me to start with that HD ?? Also I noticed when I try to install X on a 2nd drive with the defective HD connected, at the Select Destination step my comp will just crash... So now I have 9.1 on the 2nd drive which wont boot with defective disk hooked up and will try installing X.2 hoping that I can finaly start from something else than just X install CD and repair with other tools.
 
Ok I was able to run Data Rescue from OS X (2nd drive) and it cannot even see the partition containing the corrupted OS X system which appear on the desktop, not even mentionning the other ones that remain invisible... Any suggestions from here `?
 
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