Question : Problem: hard drive failure, recovery recommendations for backup clone

Yesterday I arrived at my office and found I could not get the computer to do anything. I could move the mouse around, but the rainbow colored ball was the only other thing moving.

I forced a reboot. A series of relatively loud clicking sounds comes out of the hard drive. The screen stays completely gray, then flashes to black and then hangs on gray again for a long while. The fans spin much louder than normal like they think something is overheating.

After a while, I get the system disk and question mark flashing icon. I can get the computer to boot using my DiskWarrior startup CD. Launching that, I can't even see the bad disk to try to repair it.

I have a USB drive that was just cloned (Carbon Copy Cloner) on Friday. However, I can't seem to get either my desktop or my PowerBook to recognize the system folder.

So, I'm looking for some advice, I guess. First of all, how to get it to recognize the USB drive, and what to do about the bad drive, if anything can be done at all. I haven't noticed any warning signs. The computer is about four years old.

Thanks,
-Brad

Answer : Problem: hard drive failure, recovery recommendations for backup clone

If the Disk is physically dead, there is not much you can do about it short of sending it to professional recovery shop which is expensive. Since you have a clone, presumably you should not need to to that.

G5's won't boot from USB drives.  Only Intel chip Macs will. PPC Macs will boot only from firewire drives. If your drive enclosure also includes a firewire drive, connect it to the G5 with a firewire cable. It should then boot, and you can clone it back to a new drive installed in the G5.

You could also connect your PB and the G5 together with a firewire cable and see if the PB will recognize the G5's internal drive using Firewire Target Disk Mode:  http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58583

If the internal drive in the G5 is kaput, you have a couple of choices. You could intstall a system on the new drive, then use migration assistant to copy your settings from the USB drive. Another alternative would be to connect the PB and g5 by firewire target disk mode, connect the USB drive to the PB and use carbon copy cloner to clone the USB drive back to the G5.

If your external drive does not support firewire, you could buy a firewire enclosure and transfer the drive to it.