Hi,

Firstly, sorry if this isn't posted in the forums, but here we go.

Today my hard drive has appeared to give up the ghost. Basically it froze on me. I attempted to boot the machine up again, but it took many minutes (like 10 mins) to boot up to the main OS screen.

(BTW I am using leopard on a metalic iMac, 2.4ghz machine)

So today I have purchased another hard drive (external) in hope that before I reinstall my OS back onto my internal HD, I might be able to retrieve some of the pictures/music from the original drive.

As of right now I am installing a fresh copy of the leopard OS on the external, so my question is, can I then access the internal HD files via the os on the external drive to get at the pictures etc?

If so, how would I be able to go about doing that or is this as simple as pulling things from applications and drag and drop them?

Sorry for such a wooley and long winded post, but really desperate for any advice and help people may be able to give to me.

Thanks in advance!

If it is booting up to the desktop, however long it is taking, means that the drive is spinning and the possibility of getting the files off is good. If you have a copy of DIskWarrior, run it on that drive and see if it makes a difference in speed. (it should). Booting from an external system will probably in this case show the drive on the desktop and you very well may recover your files with just a simple copy. At this point, you may want to erase the drive and install a new system and see if it runs well. In my opinion, it is only the directories that need rebuilding and DiskWarrior will do that.