hard disk hangs until smacked on side of head

K

kcam2000

Registered
I'm guessing this is a hardware issue, and I am guessing it aint good.

Yesterday my G4 ibook crashed and could not reboot. I did the Disk Util and found some errors that could only be fixed with Disk Warrior. Now that everything is up and running again, I notice that it hangs *a lot*, mostly on operations where it is writing to disk. If I just tap the computer, or give it a little nudge to the left or right everything picks up and the program completes it's task.

I am hoping that my nudging it is not really having any effect, and that it is just my imagination. I can't test it 100% of course, because I will never know if it was cooincidence that the operation finished when I nudged it, or if it was connected, though I am pretty sure it is.

Has anyone had this experience before? What should I do in this case? Is there anything I *can* do? or is it just a ruined drive?
 
Your drive may have a bad block or two... while this can usually be fixed by DiskWarrior or some comparable disk utility, it's always a good idea to "re-map" the bad blocks with a good, clean, write-zeros format.

Be sure to have everything you need backed up, as basically to re-map the blocks you gotta wipe the drive and start fresh. If problems persist after that, your hard drive may need to be replaced.

If it's under warranty and you decide to call Apple about it, I would highly suggest not telling them that you "smack" the iBook to get it working again... ;)
 
Thanks, it makes me happy to think that I might not have to buy a new hard drive.

If I back up my entire hard drive as it is, then wipe my drive clean, can I just transfer everything back over to the clean drive and it will work, or do I have to re-install the OS from the disk or something?
 
In order to be able to "copy" everything back and have a bootable system, you need to "clone" your drive to a backup first, using something like Carbon Copy Cloner ( http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13260 ), then "cloning" it back. However, I would recommend against doing it this way -- if your hard drive is damaged, more than likely, some files on the hard drive may be damaged as well. If any of these files belong to the system or are critical files, you may end up with a hard drive with no problems, but a system that has problems due to damaged files.

I would back up what you need -- applications and programs can always be re-installed from the CDs, which is time consuming, but a sure-fire way to guarantee there are no errors. Preference files can be re-setup manually and mail servers can be re-entered into the proper applications.

Music, movies, personal documents, mail and things like that should be backed up.

While it may seem time-consuming and tedious to reinstall everything from scratch, I highly recommend going that route for a clean and error-free installation.
 
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