hi,
i have a mac that has crashed and i dont know how to make a recovery disk.
any tips?
thanks,
If you have a CDROM drive (one that came with the machine or else is a third-party boot-capable drive) + the CD that the machine came with,
a) Insert disk into CDROM drive. If necessary, force the drive to open by inserting a straightened paper clip into the little hole towards the right-hand end of the drive. Boot while holding down the “C” key. If this fails, try again, this time holding down Command-Option-Delete-Shift keys.
b) Once you have booted from the CD, use the copy of Disk First Aid that is on the CD and fix anything that needs fixing on the main drive.
If you lack a bootable CDROM drive, that implies a somewhat elderly Mac, probably one with a floppy disk drive and therefore capable of booting from a System 7 or System 8 floppy, which you should have stashed away somewhere. If this is the case,
c) Insert floppy into floppy drive. If there is a floppy currently inserted, it should automatically eject if it is not bootable. If not, force it to eject using the paper-clip trick as described for the CDROM in step a above.
d) Use the copy of Disk First Aid that is on your bootable floppy.
If your misplaced the bootable CD that shipped with your Mac, or replaced a defunct Apple CDROM drive with a faster but non-bootable CDROM drive, the going gets a little trickier. Try:
e) Attempt a bootup but hold down keys Command-Option-P-R and keep them down until you hear the boot chime repeat a half dozen times, then release. This resets the parameter RAM which, if corrupted, can occasionally confuse the machine so it doesn’t boot even when nothing is wrong with the drive.
If you try all this and can’t get your Mac to boot, I may be able to help but I’ll need considerably more information, such as machine model, exactly what it does when you try to boot, etc.
AHunter3’s advice is right on the money, given the info.
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Their searchable forums have been a lifesaver many times for me.
Is it possible to be more specific? There’s no need for a silly Windows-style “recovery disk” on a Macintosh (not until we’re all eunics, anyway).
If your Mac won’t boot from one of its hard drive partitions, just boot off your original System Softare CD. You can poke around and look for the problem, do a dirty install, or a clean install.
If you have a REALLY OLD Mac without a CD-ROM, you’ll have a 3.5" floppy disk called “File Tools” or “Disk Tools” or something to that effect (sorry, it’s been years since I’ve needed that).
If you can say what happens with more specifics, we can get you a more specific response.
And if the Disk First Aid doesn’t come up w/ anything fixable (or even recognize your hard drive)… you may have to face the fact that your hard drive is toast, and must be replaced. It’s happened a few times to me (on diff. computers).
Bummer… I must be typing slowly today.
Not sure if you actually meant that you want a recovery disk to prevent things in the future, but something you can definitely do is dupe your system folder (depending on Mac model and size of drive, and if you have hopefully a zip disk or other removable storage device large enough) to removable media, this way you always have the prefs and extension sets you wanted saved/backed up somewhere.
Well, I’m not sure that we have enough info, but Hunter’s advice is pretty good. Actually, before you go there, you may want to simply try starting up with the extensions turned off. A malignant extension that happens to load early may fool a Mac novice into thinking there’s a disk problem. To start up without extensions, simply boot up with the SHIFT key down.
Another thing to check out, once you do get into a booted state, either with extensions off or with the startup CD, is make sure you didn’t accidentally select something other than your main disk drive in the Startup Disk control panel.
I can’t remember if clearing the PRAM clears this option…
One minor thing that may or may not be important … on some models, or maybe it’s some CDs, you can’t boot from the CD-ROM drive without turning AppleTalk on.
If you find that holding down the “C” key doesn’t work, start up with extensions disabled (Shift key held down during startup), open the AppleTalk control panel in the System folder, and set AppleTalk to Active (even if you have no network). You should then be able to boot from the CD-ROM drive. Once it’s working again, switch AppleTalk off.
The combination that I think doesn’t work is the OS8 CD on older PowerMacs (601-603 chip series). At any rate, I had to do this with my 6500 to reinstall the system after re-partitioning the hard drive.
And even if you don’t have a really old Mac, you can make a copy of the Disk Tools startup disk on 3.5" floppy for future use (using Disk First Aid and/or Disk Copy).
panama jack
This isn’t a .sig – it’s just a bunch of text under some underscores.
PS - for future reference, although it won’t help you much this time around–
Either put a second drive in your Mac and install a copy of the OS on it; or, if that isn’t practical (e.g., PowerBook before the removable-media bay era), partition a single drive into at least two partitions and install a copy of the OS on both partitions.
Any time you need to make your main everyday bootup drive dormant in order to defragment it or to run full-scale diagnostics on it, it is wonderfully convenient to be able to switch bootup to the other drive / partition. And the next time you have the problem you are speaking of here in this thread, you can boot up with Command-Option-Delete-Shift and it will switch to the next bootable drive in the series that it checks, bypassing the first (your normal everyday OS System Folder), and you can get your tongs on the problem at hand in short order.