attempting data recovery on otherwise inaccessible hard drives

[yawnmoth]

A friend of mine asked me if I could do some data recovery for them
and am having some difficulty doing so.

There are two partitions on the drive - "Mac OS 9.x" and "Mac OS X".
Presumably this means that the drive was using Mac OS 9.x and was
later upgraded to Mac OS X. The former partition, however, is empty.
And in /Users/, on the "Mac OS X" partition, there's only one folder -
Shared. Normally, there's another folder for the owner of the
computer, but maybe that folder is stored at a different place when
you've upgraded from Mac OS 9.x?

[David Stone]

In article
<b189271d-eaad-440c...@s28g2000vbp.googlegroups.com>,
yawnmoth <terr...@yahoo.com> wrote:

I didn't think you could simply upgrade from 9 to X? The OS X
installer (for versions up to 10.2 at least) would give you the
option of creating an OS 9 bootable partition, but the first
partition on the disk had to be the OS X one, and it had to be
less than a certain size.

If you are not seeing the files, you could try something like
DiskWarrior, which seems to get the most recommendations...

[John Albert]

yawnmouth wrote:
"There are two partitions on the drive - "Mac OS 9.x" and
"Mac OS X". Presumably this means that the drive was using
Mac OS 9.x and was later upgraded to Mac OS X. The former
partition, however, is empty."

It may just mean that the owner of the drive purposely
partitioned it, in order to have one bootable partition for
OS 9, and another for OS X. The drive in the g4 on which I'm
typing this was partitioned by me exactly for that reason.
If for some reason I couldn't boot from OS X, I could at
least get booted back to OS 9 and check things out from there.

You didn't mention whether anything is actually _on_ the OS
9 partition.
- What computer does the drive exist in?
- Is it bootable into OS 9?
- If so, have you tried booting into OS 9?
- If you can get booted in OS 9, can you "peek at" the OS X
partition, to see what might reside on it? OS 9 can "see"
things from the Finder that you can't see in OS X (i.e., the
"invisible" files).

"And in /Users/, on the "Mac OS X" partition, there's only
one folder - Shared. Normally, there's another folder for
the owner of the computer, but maybe that folder is stored
at a different place when you've upgraded from Mac OS 9.x?"

Question: are the _other_ OS X files and folders (i.e.,
those _other than_ the "Users" folder) there?

If you can't boot from the OS X partition, _maybe_ you can
boot from the OS 9 partition and ascertain this.

Could the owner's account somehow been moved, either to
another location on the OS X partition, or could it possibly
have been moved or copied to the OS 9 partition (don't even
know if this is possible, but just wondering).

Just some thoughts,
- John

[nospam]

In article <no.email-0172E1...@news1.chem.utoronto.ca>,
David Stone <no.e...@domain.invalid> wrote:

> I didn't think you could simply upgrade from 9 to X?

of course you can. os x doesn't care if os 9 is there or not.

> The OS X
> installer (for versions up to 10.2 at least) would give you the
> option of creating an OS 9 bootable partition, but the first
> partition on the disk had to be the OS X one, and it had to be
> less than a certain size.

on old macs, including beige g3 and tray load imacs, os x had to be
wholly contained within the first 8 gig of the hard drive due to a
limitation in the roms. if i recall correctly, the 10.2 installer
checked to see if that was the case while 10.1 and earlier didn't,
potentially giving the user a non-bootable system.