My Mac started moving really slow :tdown:, and I was finally able to get it to shut down after forcing all of the apps to quit and relaunching the Finder (OS X). It wouldn't boot from that point. It always hung during the "Searching (locating?) Local Disks." It did this after zapping the PRAM, and while attempting to boot from the X CD.

It is obviously a hard drive issue with one of my two drives, so I disconnected the secondary drive. It now boots without any issues. How can I now diagnose the drive if it won't boot while it is connected? It worked fine for six months or so, but now stops the system from booting if it is connected. I'm afraid the drive may have died, and I never did get the newer version of Retrospect to back up the contents under X.

Originally posted by MacInAction
My Mac started moving really slow :tdown:, and I was finally able to get it to shut down after forcing all of the apps to quit and relaunching the Finder (OS X). It wouldn't boot from that point. It always hung during the "Searching (locating?) Local Disks." It did this after zapping the PRAM, and while attempting to boot from the X CD.

It is obviously a hard drive issue with one of my two drives, so I disconnected the secondary drive. It now boots without any issues. How can I now diagnose the drive if it won't boot while it is connected? It worked fine for six months or so, but now stops the system from booting if it is connected. I'm afraid the drive may have died, and I never did get the newer version of Retrospect to back up the contents under X.

Try just using the corrupt drive as the master and with no other drive inside.

Boot up from a mac install CD and try seeing if you can look at it that way listen to see if the drive will spin up.

See if the disk utilities program works for you that might be able to straighten out your drive if its still spinning

There's no hope for this one. I tried using it alone, and it still hangs at "Searching for local disks" while booting. It sounds just like it always did when it gets power, but it apparently isn't able to read any data on the disk.

Is it possible to take one apart without pieces falling all over the place? At this point, it seems like it wouldn't hurt just to see if one of the moving parts is broken since it still spins. If it looked like something simple was broken, I'd attempt to swap parts with another one to get back the apps and CD scans I lost.