[Ham-Mac] How to Screw up your HD

[Dick Kriss, AA5VU]

I did something really dumb this morning and finally recovered.  I was in
iPhoto selecting five pictures to drag copy to a compact flash card.  I used
the Select All command and started the copy.   Something did not look right
then I realized I was in my Library rather than an Album folder and iPhoto
was copying my whole library of photos to the desktop because I messed up
dragging them to CF card.  The G4 was going crazy so I hit the panic button
the front to force a restart.  It restarted but OSX 10.4.5 could not mount
the desktop.  I had and endless spinning disc.

I could not remember the keyboard combination to force the machine to boot
from another drive so I messed around with until I could get the DVD drive
open to be able to insert and boot from the OSX 10.4 startup disc.  Finally
got it to boot and used the Startup option to boot from my Backup HD.  It
worked find the recovery was to trash the Desktop file from the Primary
drive and replace it with a copy from the Backup drive.  I did not want to
do full backup from the backup because I did not want to lose some new stuff
that was not backed up.  I then had to use the Disc Utility to mount the
Primary drive so it could be selected as the startup drive. While I had the
Disc Utility open I repaired the primary drive.  It all worked and I am now
back on the Primary HD. Humpty-Dumpty is back together again.

The moral to this shaggy-dog story is NEVER use the iPhoto Select All if you
are in the Library.  Everything is now working great thanks to Carbon Copy
Cloner and having a good backup drive.

I was trying to do too many things at the same time really messed up.

TNX for reading 

73, Dick AA5VU