I have an issue with my G5 iMac. Basically its died, the motherboard and backlight are dead, it is not cost effective to repair it however there is a lot of stuff on the hard drive that I need. Is there an easy/simpleish way of retrieving the info? For example can I plug the harddrive into another mac or pc and pull the information off that way?

Cheers for any help in advance!

Si

If its anything like a windows laptop, which it probably isnt () then you should be able to pull the HDD out and pop it in another Mac laptop and it should work.

I've never tried it myself but:

http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/default.asp

Claims to allow you to pop the mac drive into a PC and read it natively.

If you have access to a linux based PC I bet you can find a Linux set up that will mount the drive.

This message being typed on a machine with the hard drive out of a dead Compaq 2100. The laptop died, I rehomed the HD in this old machine and lost nothing.
Bit of fiddling with settings and that was it.

Hopefully, you will be the same.

That MacDrive looks like it might do the trick. Anyone know of a free copy?
If it was a PC drive, I'd have no worries with it, I'm just unsure as to the compatability between Mac/PC software, ie will the PC motherboard recognise/read the HD or just do nothing? I have an old PC lying about, but don't want to risk corrupting an awful lot of music files.

I have used MacDrive for recoving stuff off Mac hardisks from a dead G5. I thought it had a 15 or 30 day free trial which is plenty long enough to recover what you need

Only issue you might have is that the MacBook will be on a 2.5" drive and the IDE cable from PC won't fit, but I generally dismantle a laptop external USB drive (i.e one of the 2.5" type) and plug laptop disks into them to get USB connectivity to my PC.

Mark

[Edited on 8/5/07 by Paradoxia0]

It's not a laptop/Ibook, or whatever Apple call them, it's one of these
. Will that make any difference?

I think they take a standard 3.5" serial ATA disk. I think most PCs that are less than 2 years old have SATA. If you ahve got SATA then no problem plugging it straight into PC, if you don't then a PCI SATA controller from eBay will cost less that £10.

Mark

So it should just be a case of hooking the hard drive up as external drive, or can I get away with plugging it straight in, as the PC currently could do with a full reset anyway? Just a bit scared of wiping all the wife's music! There's about 10Gb of stuff which I really don't want to re-load, especially as some of it was down loaded.

I am surprised your mac is not economical to repair. Try checking on google for 3rd party fixers, apple shops will be a rip off. The disk will work in any other recent mac, if you can find a tower G5 or possibly a G4tower there should be a second spare ata port that you can plug the drive right into but don't try booting from it.

Caber

What is it with the masc at the mo? Mine has just died £600 + vat + fitting to repair, mum's died a g5 imac (the power supply went but is now working again......and now yours?! Not to be dettered I'm typing this from a shiney powerbook g4 that I stole off my dad until I replace mine.....(could be a while!)....Oli.

Perhaps because, like everything else that Apple make, its very poorly made. Their stuff tends to be made of the naffest plastic and cheapest parts, then a big price whacked on for the sake of a fashion statement at the moment.

If you want to stick 2 fingers up to m$ (dont we all?) you are better off running linux than a mac.

David

It's not worth it as I only paid £600 for it in the first place! The only price I can find for a new mother board thing was about £300. Then I need a new back light, which may be a whole new screen, as I just can't be ar$ed to look.

Yep, what the flak dude said. With the Mac you are paying quite a bit for the OS licence rather than the usualy £15 to £20 they add on for a generic PC running windoze OEM.

Slap Linux on a box , run as a normal user and not root and, other than the tacked on feel that the GUI generally has and it often being a pain installing software Linux is pretty decent.

I've been using Linux (mostly Red Hat Application Server) for around 5 years and its been pretty good, though its very rare I even go into the GUI or even log directly on to the machine itself.

With the Mac Disk the biggest problem would be the disk format rather than the plugs. Hence trying to mount it on a Linux box as a foriegn drive or using the MacDrive software.