I need to know if anyone has had a problem on mac. i have a G4 and tonight the worst has happened!
the screen just flashed a folder with a smile alternating with a question mark.
apparently, according to the apple people, the hard drive was initialized. obviously i didn't do it. i just had a drive with untitled written on it.
does anyone know what could have happened, if it could be a virus?Is there a way to get the info back!!!!
Posted by Jim Upchurch (Member # 209) on :
Sounds like a virus alright. Are you saying the hard drive is blank ? If so you need to get an antivirus program and run it. I hope they root out people who do this kind of stuff, throw them in jail and throw the key away.
Posted by Rick (Member # 373) on :
do you have a start up cd? something to get the machine going. then change over to your untitled file (hard drive) and see if everything is there?
If I remember right, that happened to my G3 once, it had something to do with the machine not being able to find the startup files. I think I zapped the p-ram (command, option, p, and r, while restarting) to get everything in order again. you lose all your preferences in extensions, but not any files.
Go to macworld.com and ask, Im sure someone there can help you.
Posted by Kim Silvia (Member # 877) on :
i have norton antivirus and i ran it as well. no luck. zapped the pram. nothing.
the drive has somehow been initialized according to apple. all they say is that either i did it or someone snuck in my office took out my hard drive and replaced it with an blanked out hard drive. WHAT kind of tech support is that?
i'll try mac world. i'm over the initial shock (a few temper tantrums, etc.)now nothing works right still after reinstall. i haven't done anything else. i'm still hoping to get back the stuff on the hd, but i'm losing faith at this point.
I need to know how this happened, how to prevent it, and Can this be spread from pc's to mac over the internet? in other words, how the heck did it happen?
Posted by John Deaton III (Member # 925) on :
Do what Rick said. Start up from a system disk. Shoulda been one that came with your computer. Put it in the cdrom and it will automatically boot up from that. Once it starts up, you can then click on the hard drive to see if anything is still on there. I had that problem the other day. When the icon has a question mark in it, the system can't find the hard drive to boot up. In my case, strange as it seems, I had too many things on the desktop. Cleaned it up, and no more question mark. Actually I never heard of a hard drive getting re-initialized via virus,etc. Also, if you have disk first aid, you should try and run it on the hard drive to see whats wrong. This is a strange one.
Posted by Ron Helliar (Member # 398) on :
[ July 04, 2003, 10:10 AM: Message edited by: Ron Helliar ]
