Is my Mac mini G4's Hard Drive Dead?

[wyattaj25]

I have Mac mini G4, and I have a Leopard Partition for it to be used as a file server / internet sharing device.

I wanted to make a second partition for OS 9 using this forum's patcher, and the first time it worked fine. I booted into my freshly burned CD, and I tried to install it to the second partition, and it wasn't there. It just said the HDD itself was unmounted and the second partition wasn't recognized.

I restarted into Leopard to see if it was still there, and sure enough, both partitions were mounted on the desktop. I decided to delete the second partition, and expanded the original volume to the original 80 GB size.

I rebooted once again into the OS 9 installer, and it still said that the hard drive was unmounted. I then decided to make the partition using the setup itself, and I made the OS 9 partition 20 GB. I selected that that partition was the drive I wanted to install to, and the install proceeded smoothly.

I restarted into the boot menu via option (⌥) and the only drive that appeared was "Mac OS 9," but no larger partition, "Mac OS X." Did I wipe the entire hard drive? Is Leopard still accessible? Or, did the writing and rewriting of the hard drive kill it?

TL;DR: I tried to make two partitions of the hard drive, and now one has disappeared. What happened?

Any Help would be appreciated!

[GaryN]

HARD to be 100% certain…BUT it sounds like the OS9 drivers were never installed originally.

THAT would account for you being able to resize and partition then see both in OSX but them not be seen by the OS9 installer.

THEN when you partitioned the drive with the OS9 installer, it treated it as a fresh installation. It wiped the drive, installed the OS9 drivers and
partitioned it. You should have seen at least one warning that you were about to erase the drive……eh???

SO, yup… you have deleted the entire OSX install. AND it's likely unrecoverable because the OS9 install was written over it. The directory is probably gone so you would have to use a serious recovery tool to extract raw data etc etc. I hope there wasn't anything priceless there…

BECAUSE the only practical step now is to start over… from scratch. I hope you have a Leopard DVD.

NOW, you should, with the Leopard installer, reinitialize the drive, install OS9 drivers again (there's a check box for it when you setup the drive) and partition it again for OS9. Then try the OS9 installer again. Hopefully, you'll see the second partition.

I hope I'm correct (about the OS9 drivers not being installed) because if not, I just wasted a lot of time typing.

[wyattaj25]

Ah, I see. Thankfully, everything that was valuable was on an external drive, so all i lost was the leopard install and a couple of apps that I had already backed up.

I do have a bootleg copy of leopard, so that I can fix.

I'll reinstall leopard and make a 2nd partition with the OS 9 drivers, hopefully that will work.

Well, I'm sure I will be able to sort everything out!

Thanks!

[macarone]

>I'll reinstall leopard and make a 2nd partition with the OS 9 drivers

The OS 9 drivers are installed when a HD is formatted and partitioned.

If the drive does not have the OS 9 drivers installed, they CANNOT be installed on a single partition.

Installing OS 9 drivers on a HD that does not already have them will ERASE everything on all partitions on the drive.