Hard Drive Trouble | PowerPC Macintosh Liberation Army

#1 Tue May 29, 2007 12:12 am Hard Drive Trouble

My wife's Mac is acting up, and I'm a little out of my element here.

This morning, it KPed on her in the midst of retrieving email. A restart revealed the alternating folder with question mark and Mac face. So no prob, I figured, something weird happened, and the System got unblessed or something.

Well, I booted from the 10.4 DVD, and Disk Utility reported that there was an error: Invalid B-Tree Node Size or some such problem was the root of the trouble. Of course, Disk Utility couldn't fix it.

So off to the local Apple store we go. $99 later, I've got DiskWarrior 4 (the last one I used was 2.0.x on OS 9). I've been running DW4 for about 7 hours now, and I'm still on step 5 (rebuilding the directory) and DW has reported over 3000 hardware errors. You know the message: "Speed reduced due to hardware malfunction: ####"

Yeah, over 3000.

It's a 120 GB disk.

Now I'm no expert on hard drives, but it seems to me that if there really were that many bad sectors (which, supposedly, is what DW is reporting when it increments this counter), the disk would have either been entirely unusable for a long time, or have just suffered a head crash. And seeing as how the disk was working fine until this morning, and a head crash should be pretty obvious, I'm a little perplexed.

The next thing I'm going to try is to build an OS 9 boot drive on a FireWire disk with DW2 and see if I can at least rescue some of the data.

Does anybody have any ideas about this? What are some good disk utils for OS X?

Peace,
Drew

Power to the PowerPC!

#2 Tue May 29, 2007 1:06 am

Since you know what a crash sounds like, and aren't hearing that, the most likely failure is somewhere in the read channel electronics. It could be intermittent/poor connections between the pc board and the head assembly contacts. Dunno how desperate you are, but if DW doesn't fix it for you (or makes things worse), you might try removing the drive's pc board, cleaning the contacts and reassembling. I've encountered problems similar to yours a couple of times, and this procedure fixed one (maybe two). In a couple of other cases, a transplant of the pc board fixed it. If you happen to have an identical donor drive (or can find one; a crashed one should be cheap), that might be worth a try, too, if you get desperate enough.

Good luck, and let us know how you make out.

#3 Tue May 29, 2007 7:09 am Re: Hard Drive Trouble

#4 Fri Jul 6, 2007 12:37 am

#5 Fri Jul 6, 2007 9:07 am

Not well.

DiskWarrior failed to fix whatever problems I had. In fact, it counted upwards of 16000 disk errors! I think it did suffer a head crash after all. The drive was making a faint "ticking" sound which could have been the head skipping off the platter...

DW allowed us to recover some of the photographs we had stored on the drive, but we lost a good deal of everything else including all of my wife's archived email.

I picked up a FirmTek SeriTek 1S2 SATA controller and Maxtor III 300 GB SATA hard drive as a replacement. The drive and card seem fast enough, but now I'm having trouble installing OS X from my 10.4.6 DVD. I get about 2/3 of the way through and the installer gives up claiming "problems during the installation."

Man, when it rains, it pours.

Peace,
Drew

Power to the PowerPC!

#6 Fri Jul 6, 2007 3:12 pm

Just out of curiosity, did Disk Utility give you any complaints about the s.m.a.r.t. status of the drive? It might not be dead if Disk Utility didn't complaina bout that, but I don't know if powermac g4s can detect s.m.a.r.t. status.

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#7 Fri Jul 6, 2007 6:25 pm

DU did tell me that the drive was in trouble. I don't recall what the exact S.M.A.R.T. status was. At first, there didn't seem to be anything wrong per the SMART sensor, but after a few runs through DU and DiskWarrior, the thing definitely said it had trouble. I'm glad it was so predictive... Wink

Peace,
Drew

Power to the PowerPC!

#8 Sat Jul 7, 2007 1:15 am

I mainly ask because it seems like my iMac (though not PPC, I suppose) is predicting the death of its internal hard disc, and I've only had that drive since February. (though there's no telling how long it was circulating 'round before that, as the drive was a replacement from Apple.)

I'm not sure if it's a false death-prediction, or if it's actually going to die soo. I suppose I'll find out in the coming weeks. (I'm going to ring up Apple soon though, because I want to have them replace it.)

At any rate, never fun when a drive dies, especially if you haven't backed up the data on it. (SuperDuper = friend of Cory)

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#9 Sat Jul 7, 2007 12:15 pm

#10 Sat Jul 7, 2007 1:54 pm

all g4´s can.

#11 Sat Jul 7, 2007 3:07 pm

All systems with the proper software can. It's a function of the capbility of the drive to have S.M.A.R.T. to begin with, and of the OS/drivers to read. It doesn't really matter so much as to the computer mobo/controller hardware as it's been a spec for drives. The controller can matter in some cases, such as USB/FW enclosures, though.

#12 Sun Jul 8, 2007 5:39 pm

Good info that G3/G4 macs can read s.m.a.r.t. status, I hadn't checked on any of my systems before this, probably something that only makes itself important when a failure is imminent.

Well, my drive is definitely on its way out. After leaving the system off for a few days and then turning it back on today, it was evident I'd have to get it replaced. it's making crunching noises and generally acting like a failing hard disc, including still reporting failing s.m.a.r.t. status.

I'll call Apple tomorrow.

[Insert Cool Signature here!]

#13 Sun Jul 8, 2007 9:11 pm

Run, don't walk, to your nearest backup utility! Make a copy of that drive ASAP! If it's making "crunching" noises, it's only a matter of time before it is unusable and the data unrecoverable...

Peace,
Drew

Power to the PowerPC!

#14 Tue Jul 10, 2007 5:44 pm

I'm booted from my backup now, Apple is sending somebody to replace the internal drive.

(only disadvantage of an iMac so far: not user-accessible)

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#15 Tue Jul 10, 2007 11:39 pm

That's pretty cool. They are actually sending someone to you to replace the drive? Nice. For some reason, I thought AppleCare was a "carry it in" service.

Peace,
Drew

Power to the PowerPC!

#16 Fri Aug 17, 2007 11:26 pm

Final Update: I never did get OS X 10.4 to install directly from the DVD. I ended up duplicating my Pismo's hard drive to the wife's Mac via Carbon Copy Cloner. For whatever reason, I just can't install 10.4 directly.

Has anybody else out there moved over to a SATA drive on their G4 yet? If so, are you having any trouble installing OS X?

Peace,
Drew

Power to the PowerPC!