Hey Cantbecanit:
Thanks for chiming in.
You having not used a Mac, I'm kind of in your boat, just on the other side. While I have used PCs plenty, my skill and expertise is certainly not with PCs, as I use Macs at home and in work, and haven't used a PC for any serious length of time in at least a decade. In respect to slaving a drive, with my having three externals (only of which I can boot to, as I discovered that for as great as having a 1TB FireWire drive may be, Western Digitial didn't make it boot-capable...fortuanately my other FireWire external that is about four years its senior does).
I was about to play with the pins on the Seagate to make it a slave, but once I had the computer know which computer to boot to via Startup Disk, that didn't seem to be that big a deal.
On #2. What data recovery programs are out there? Everywhere I read, people talk about "data recovery programs" without giving any specifics. The reason is because is:
UPDATE:
After coming to the realization that no software was going to get me up and running with the drive, after testing the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB drive on another G4 this morning, and getting similar, if not worse results on that one (as I couldn't even get it to be listed in the DiskUtility window that I had happen previously, even though I couldn't verify/repair disk on my computer either) — I took the mindset that by partitioning the drive — if it still was a kosher drive — that I could then take it to a data recovery place as a last resort.
I had planned on taking the drive for data recovery to a place near my home, but of course unknown to me until this morning they closed up shop after more than a decade in the community just last month. Being antsy and wanting some resolution, upon reading that by partitioning a drive, it would not zero out my data, made it sound that it should be an easy recovery, and at least start the process.
Then again, I was wondering if there was some software that I could get to be able to do that myself, or some method so I don't have to fork over $$$$ if it's an easy thing to do myself? After reading up on partitioning, it indicated that I wasn't deleting anything, and that it was in essence re-jigging my drive. So I took my 75GB drive, and split it 15GB/60GB. In an blink I had two drives that I could access once again.
I was overjoyed seeing that I could access my drives once again....
I ran the verify/repair options, with no errors coming up. From there, I then began to reinstall OSX 10.5 on one partition, but stopped immediately, knowing that having the OS wasn't necessary at this point, as I still have an outboard FireWire drive to boot to.
I then rebooted the machine to that FireWire drive, and to my sadness, while the two partitions appeared on the desktop, one was a completely empty partition (60GB) and one with just 64K (15GB).
I knew it wouldn't be that easy.
Having already scoured Disk Utility, DiskWarrior and found no tools able to recover the data, and used the Data Recovery "tool" in TechTool Pro 5, with it only bringing up about 30 System files at the most based on a single search for one letter in the alphabet, I'm all ears at this point at what I can do possibly on my end.
At least I know that the drive is in working order, despite the few people I talked to who tried to tell me that the drive just suddenly breathed it's last breath, and would never work again.
The 10.5.8 update has something to do with why the drive fried, and there doesn't seem to be anything physically wrong with the drive. After five years of flawless performance, the day I did the update, the computer started acting wacked, and once I restarted the first time after it was fully installed, I've been in this heck ever since. While I've got a ton of apps on the drive, the big thing is I have about six years of e-mails, and more importantly about six years of photos (and thousands of them) as well.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
