What's your favorite brand drive?
11/10/09 Filed in: Hardware
Scotty,
Two questions:
1) One of the children's I-Macs will not boot up. It just continues to show the dial spinning. On occasion it will say either turn off the machine or push the restart button. Can you tell me what to do?
2) I can not get my computer in my office to attach to time machine. it say disk full but there is no way that it is? What can I do?
Can you handle this over the email or do we need to have you come to the house?
_________
Response 1: Most commonly this sounds like the drive has died. I might first suggest booting from the install DVD that came with your computer or any purchased copy of OS X later than your computer purchase. There is an application called Disk Utilities in the menu when booted from the CD that can help determine if your disk is bad or if it's just a software problem. There are many things it could be. I wouldn't really know unless I was in front of the machine to run multiple tests to determine what is actually going on.
Response 2: I'm assuming you are getting a dialog box that says that the external drive is full and therefore Time Machine doesn't feel like it has enough free space on the external drive in order to save all the data from the internal. If you are using this external as a TM backup drive then I would suggest erasing the drive completely anyway and dedicate the entire drive to TM. That's sort of like killing an ant with a bat but it should work. I prefer not to share my TM backup drive with any other data. In today's computer world, we need several hard drives in your lives.
Two questions:
1) One of the children's I-Macs will not boot up. It just continues to show the dial spinning. On occasion it will say either turn off the machine or push the restart button. Can you tell me what to do?
2) I can not get my computer in my office to attach to time machine. it say disk full but there is no way that it is? What can I do?
Can you handle this over the email or do we need to have you come to the house?
_________
Response 1: Most commonly this sounds like the drive has died. I might first suggest booting from the install DVD that came with your computer or any purchased copy of OS X later than your computer purchase. There is an application called Disk Utilities in the menu when booted from the CD that can help determine if your disk is bad or if it's just a software problem. There are many things it could be. I wouldn't really know unless I was in front of the machine to run multiple tests to determine what is actually going on.
Response 2: I'm assuming you are getting a dialog box that says that the external drive is full and therefore Time Machine doesn't feel like it has enough free space on the external drive in order to save all the data from the internal. If you are using this external as a TM backup drive then I would suggest erasing the drive completely anyway and dedicate the entire drive to TM. That's sort of like killing an ant with a bat but it should work. I prefer not to share my TM backup drive with any other data. In today's computer world, we need several hard drives in your lives.
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