booting harddrive problem.

W

widemac

Registered
I was using my PowerBook G4 until it just froze for no apparent reason, so I turned it off and restarted it, it loaded into mac os x and then froze again.

Now when you boot it it normally stays on the grey screen with the apple logo and the spinning circle, if you leave it for about 20 minutes it goes to a blue screen and never changes from there.

I have tried setting the open firmware, reset-all, nvram-reset, pram reset, I tried diskwarrior.

I can log into single user mode and see my files but I cant do anything with them, I try to enable write mode but get some errors like failure to replay the journal.

I tried fsck, using diskutil to repair the drive, I tried diskwarrior but it comes up with an error.

So I thought I would just format the drive and start again, but now I can't even do that, I try to erase the disk with diskutil booted of the install cd but it comes up with an "unknown error -20". I try repair disk and it seems to work fine.

When I try to do an install nothing shows up as a install destination, but if you boot the computer and hold option, the harddrive does show up as a bootable option.

I have not only lost my files but can't even get my powerbook working again, please help me.

Cheers.
 
Could be a bad hard drive, IDE cable or IDE Controller on the logic board.
My guess, the drive is bad.
 
Thank you for the tip bobw, I took it to my local Apple shop and they had a look and basically did all the tests that I had already done, then said the tech's had to look at it.

But 2 days later they gave it back with a new hard drive, sadly I lost about 30 gigs of work (which I know is my fault for not backing up), and the fact that the new hard drive is noisy as hell when it is working.

Atleast it was all done under warranty, luckily I got three years of warranty on hardware for purchasing it as a student.

I was just thinking, I took very good care of my PowerBook, the only thing I can think of is for basically the first 2 years I've had it I ran it flat on the desk, but about a month ago I got an iCurve style unit to place it on which made it operate on an angle, would this have anything to do with the drive failing?
 
Two things that kill a hard drive fastest:
1) moving the drive suddenly while it's spinning
2) constant spinning up & spinning down. (wears out the drive motor)

While you can't make a drive last forever, you can do a few things to ensure longest possible drive life:

1) In the Energy Saver Preference Pane, uncheck "Put Drives to Sleep Whenever Possible". Sounds weird, but keeping a drive spinning is better than letting it spin down every time it's idle.

2) Always put the laptop to sleep before moving it. Sleep spins down the drive and parks the head.
 
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