Please Help me find my hard drive that's disappeared off o..

Ok, I'll try and make this quick. Someone gave me a 350mhz G4 (AGP
model) last year with a 10 gb drive about half filled. It was running
OS/X 10.2 but I didn't have any discs for it.

I then installed a second 160gb drive (about 130 gb visible) still
running the system off of the 10gb drive. Over the course of the year
the 10gb drive became totally full, with only about 300mb free until
today when it became totally unoperational, blacking out and refreshing
whenever you click on a menu option. This is AFTER moving every file
and application, mp3, and jpg to the newer larger drive. File searches
couldn't even find any files larger than 100mb so there must have been
some weird invisible files going on?

Anyway, so today I had to get a project out but the computer didn't
work at all so I paniced and took the OS/X restore disc that came with
a powerbook I recently bought and loaded it up to the 160 gb drive to
establish that as the system disc. It runs great now but now I can't
even view the other drive (which had my email accounts set up on it).
How can I get back to being able to use both drives but running the
system off of the larger drive?

HELP!!!!

Thanks,
Frank

ironfrank.RemoveThis@gmail.com writes:
>
> Ok, I'll try and make this quick. Someone gave me a 350mhz G4 (AGP
> model) last year with a 10 gb drive about half filled. It was
> running OS/X 10.2 but I didn't have any discs for it.
>
> I then installed a second 160gb drive (about 130 gb visible) still
> running the system off of the 10gb drive. Over the course of the
> year the 10gb drive became totally full, with only about 300mb free
> until today when it became totally unoperational, blacking out and
> refreshing whenever you click on a menu option. This is AFTER
> moving every file and application, mp3, and jpg to the newer larger
> drive. File searches couldn't even find any files larger than 100mb
> so there must have been some weird invisible files going on?
>
> Anyway, so today I had to get a project out but the computer didn't
> work at all so I paniced and took the OS/X restore disc that came
> with a powerbook I recently bought and loaded it up to the 160 gb
> drive to establish that as the system disc. It runs great now but
> now I can't even view the other drive (which had my email accounts
> set up on it). How can I get back to being able to use both drives
> but running the system off of the larger drive?

The drive may have gone bad. It happens from time to time.

If you run your favorite disk-repair utility (I recommend Micromat's
Tech Tool Pro, but Apple's Disk Utility will also work), does it see
a drive there at all? If it does, does it see any partitions you can
verify or repair?

If it can't find the drive at all, then you're SOL. The drive is
dead. Check your cables, to make sure nothing's pulled loose. If
they're all OK, throw out the drive.

If it can find the drive, but no partitions, then something garbled
the disk's formatting. You might be able to recover it with the
right utility, but I wouldn't expect much. You might be able to
resurrect the drive (without your files) by performing a low level
(or at least the lowest level your software allows) format on the
drive.

If it can find disk partitions, but they won't mount in the Finder,
then it is likely that a good repair utility will be able to fix
them. Try one or more of Tech Tool Pro, Disk Warrior and Apple's
Disk Utility.

I would avoid using Norton Utilities. I've heard far too many bad
reports to ever use a Symantec disk utility on one of my Macs.

-- David