Hello... yes, I just joined in hopes to get some help. My 27" iMac's HD is in the process of or has crapped out. I am on my old Powerbook G4 now.

Here is my issue I am needing help with: I am in need of getting my pics off my iMac. I could careless about anything else, but the pics of my dog mean everything (he passed a couple months ago).

I have the two computers connected via firewire...held the "T" key on the iMac upon powering up to get it to show on my laptop... sure enough, it shows up and I have the firewire logo dancing around the screen on the iMac. When I click into the displayed HD of that computer, it shows nothing!!!! Am I doing this right?

PLEASE HELP

Have you tried running Apple's Disk Utility on it to try and repair the disk from T mode?

Hang in there, Galazio,
I'm afraid I can't answer your problem, but someone here might.
I've been told the number one thing to do is stop trying to troubleshoot.
The more you access your hard drive, the more the chance you might overwrite something.
(Someone will correct me if I'm wrong)

The iMac get the boot-up tone... then grey screen... was getting the apple logo with the spinning gear, but now it appears as if the apple is replaced with a ghostbusters logo minus the ghost (circle with a slash through it)

When I connected the imac to the laptop, the HD appeared... but when I clicked into it, nothing.

Can't get to it to run anything... doesn't get past the tone & grey screen.

Run Disk Utility from the laptop on the iMac drive while the iMac is connected to the laptop in T mode.

Here's what I have:

The laptop is connected to the iMac... the iMac's display shows the firewire logo and it is moving around the display. I did get the power-up tone on the iMac....

but it is not showing up on my laptop's display like the external drive does....

It showed the HD last night when I connected them (but nothing appeared in there once you clicked into it), now this morning, nothing shows, not even the HD icon on the laptop.

hummmm

I am stumped.

The HD may have finally gone out. At this point I would pull the drive from the iMac since the machine is no longer functioning and put the drive into an external case to see if you can perform a maintenance on it from there.

If you don't have an external SATA case it might not be a bad idea to get one anyway, that way you could make a backup solution once this is all over. You can just put a hard drive into the external case for your Time Machine backup.

Just sayin'.

BTW Stellar Phoenix has a demo of their drive recovery program. Once you get the drive into an external case you can run the app to see if it can even recognize the drive and data. If it does you can purchase to get full functions. Make note though, it can take hours to run if you have a lot of data on the drive and if it is a big drive.