so, i hadn't tried to power up my old Mac Powerbook in a while, probably a year or more but not ages and ages. Is an old black one that runs OS 9.2 i think. a few weeks ago i tried to turn it on to no avail. Even plugged in, the battery lights didn't even flicker, so i guessed it might just be a faulty power supply, or possibly the internal battery had gone flat. Anyway, i have a shinier PowerBook G4 now that runs OS 10.4 and is considerably faster, so i just thought i'd take the hard-drive out and use it as an external, since it wasn't that old - the original one went into meltdown about 5 or 6 years ago so i replaced it.
Just now (it took a while as i had to buy little star-shaped screwdrivers) i put it into an external hard-disk case and plugged it in. It powers up a green lights start blinking, but it doesn't show up on the desktop. I can't remember if firewire stuff only mounts at start-up, so i restart. Computer hangs on shutdown. hmm. After several minutes i force the power off and restart with the thing plugged in. Starts up a little slow but ok, again, nothing appears on the desktop, so i go to Disk Utility - which spins and spins for about ten minutes then says "this disk is unreadable by this computer. do you wish to initialise?" er, no thanks. hmm.
after a few more minutes i open Disk Utility again. It shows up ok, but won't mount. says, in a most distressing way "available 37.3 GB, used -". i'm seeing if it'll write a disk image right now. it's thinking about it.
i wonder what happened to it? i think everything important was backed up, uni work and portfolio etc, but not entirely sure. i actually wanted to pull some music demos of it, which i don't have elsewhere since Yahoo deleted my briefcase files... so, i'd quite like the data back. waah.