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OT: Installing OS on a hard drive already in use
Hi folks,
Sorry this is so far off topic here, but I’ve posted on other mac forums with no responses so far and I am wasting valuable time with my computer being down. Everyone here has always helped me out of jams.
Here’s the short version: my hard drive which my computer boots from is not being seen by the computer anymore. I have a second hard drive in the computer with plenty of room on it to host my os and programs. Is it safe to load an os onto a drive that has all of my media and project files saved? This drive is a 300gb drive that’s a little less than half full. I just recently installed it into my computer and it can still be recognized by the computer. What I need to know is: is my data safe if I were to go ahead and install the os and program files?
Nevermind that media should be on a seperate drive from the os and programs. I can remedy that once I get the computer to boot up again. I’m just trying to get to the point of it booting up.
If you can answer the above questions, I can move forward, but if you want to know the full story of everything I’ve done so far to deduce that the drive is in fact bad and other details in order to give me more specified advice, here’s the long story cut and pasted from the apple.com discussion board:
Hi,
My computer is no longer seeing my main hard drive that has the operating system installed on it. When I first came in to work this morning and powered on the computer, I got the little finder icon flashing in the middle of the screen with a question mark. I took that to mean that it couldn’t find the disk to boot from for whatever reason. So I booted from the OSX disk. I then clicked quit install. The computer prompted me to either quit, cancel (I think), or select the boot disk. I chose to select the boot disk. When I did that, my hard drive with the OS on it was one of the selectable options. So I picked it and restarted. The computer restarted fine, I did some normal operations with the computer on and everything worked fine, and I restarted the computer to see if the problem would come back. It started with no problem from the main hard drive.
Coincedentally, today is the day that I received an ultra ata card so I can put my big hard drive, which I’ve been using via firewire external case, directly into my computer. I was apprehensive about doing this today since my day started off with computer problems, but I figured what else am I going to do? So I installed the card and the hard drive. I edit video. I figured the best system would be to use the first hard drive as my operating system and programs drive and to use the second hard drive, which I just installed today, as my media drive.
I powered the computer on after I completed installation. I got the same result as the first time I turned the computer on today- the flashing finder face with a question mark. I again booted from the cdrom, but this time my hard drive was not an option for booting from. To see if the hard drive I just installed in fact did install properly, I clicked through a few steps of installing the os from the disk. My new hard drive is an option to install the operating system to. The computer did see all of the data on the 2nd drive, or at least told me an accurate number of GBs used, and the computer saw the name I had given the drive. However, the original hard drive is not an option for installing the os to from the disk. For some reason my computer will not let me see that hard drive.
There is plenty of room on my new hard drive to install the os to. Is this what I should do? Is there a trick to getting to see my old hard drive? Do you suppose I’m up the creek on retrieving data from the original drive?
Thanks in advance! Sorry for the length of this post.
Jason
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1 Reply
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I’m not following you at all but that’s the trouble with posts like this.
There only three basic things that will give you a flashing ?: 1. Corrupted or otherwise damaged System files or a bad directory that points to them. 2. Damaged or otherwise unusable data or power cable to or from the drive. 3. Conflicts with drive slave/master settings, a messed up jumper or software that governs that setting.
You can install your OS on any drive that has the room but you know that running the OS and media form the same drive is asking for trouble during capture and playback.
You should run Disk Utility and repair your System from the installer; you haven’t indicated you’ve done that.
Like to offer more help but I need less detail.
bogiean
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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