Help!!! - Mac Hard Drive Trouble

[Rosie]

My hard drive on my PowerBook G4 says it is locked. I KNOW I didn't lock it. I've searched online and haven't come up with a solution. Does anyone know how to unlock a hard drive?

 

[Rosie]

Uh, never mind, I ran disk utility and that seems to have solved it. Sorry for all of the alarm and unhappy faces. :

 

[scotrace]

Now I'm curious: What was the error msg and where did it pop up?

 

[Starius]

I am curious about the message too.

Did it actually say "locked" in the message? Or is that your terminology?
That seems unusual to me.
There are some advanced hard drives with a internal bios that can be locked with a password, but certainly were not used in G4 powerbooks. Or you could lock a hard drive with the built in filevault encryption... but I don't think thats what is going on here.

You've gotten me curious about this error too!

 

[Fletch]

If the error repeats, you might want to go over it with a 3rd party disk utility like DiskWarrior, or take it in to your local geek and have 'em run tests.

 

[Rosie]

I was cleaning off my desktop and when I tried to move a folder to my hard drive a dialogue box popped up saying the hard drive could not be modified..something something.

When I double clicked my hard drive, a little pencil with a line through it, (like the old ghostbusters sign) showed up on the hard drive- couldn't write to it. I ran a search on google and nothing popped up. Then the little genius that resides in my head and pops up every so often, giving me the semblance of intelligence said - "run disk utility". It worked but, I haven't used the computer much since this morning, I'm hoping this won't happen again, not really sure why it happened in the first place.

 

[Mike in Seattle]

Hi Rosie -

First, I'll say I know precious little about Macs...only what I've gleaned having to do a few simple things using my partner's because we're away and I don't have my laptop or I'm doing something for him while he's out of the office to keeping his computer churning away on this or that project.

BUT...having had a whole lot of experience with PC's and hard disks, my feeling is any time a hard disk does something really weird and out of the ordinary, step one is a complete backup of absolutely everything. Something like that, in my experience can sometimes (not always, of course) be a sign of problems to come with the drive or the computer. Better safe than sorry.

External drives that connect via USB or Firewire are getting ridiculously cheap. I just got a 500 gig for $149 yesterday. I'm sure you need significantly smaller capacity. I've seen 100 gig externals for $69-89. They make backing up absolutely everything on your computer a snap.

Consider, God forbid, if your hard disk DOES crash in the not too distant future, how much time and effort you're going to have to put in to restore the data on your computer. There'll probably be things that you can't restore because you had the only copy. With the backup, you put a new hard drive in the computer, install the OS, and then start restoring from the external drive.

Once everything's backed up, I think I'd make an appointment at the local Apple Store's Genius Bar and have them give you some advice. Explain what you were doing & what happened, see if they can replicate the same thing, and usually, they'll give you fair & honest advice on some diagnostic/repair software that might not be bad to have.

And aforementioned partner is the total Mac tech-head, so PM me with your email if you wish and I'll put him in contact with you.

Mike

 

[Chanfan]

Excellent advise on backing up. Always a good idea, unfortunately, often seems hard to get people to put into regular practice (myself included).