Hard drive bizareness...

A

andagain

Registered
Hi all,

I believe I am having some significant problems with multiple internal drives and was hoping I could gather some advice and info here.

I have 3 internal drives on a g4 MDD 1.25 ghz. About a week ago I started to notice some strange problems when i tried to save files to one of the drives. I ran Disc Utilities and found errors that were confirmed by tech tool pro to be bad blocks. I backed up all the data and reformatted the drive with the write zeros option as per the advice of Techtool pro 4.

Upon restoring the drive I still got many bad block errors so I figured that the drive was dead. Fine.

The drive currently is mounted but there is no data on it at all.
All the data that was on that drive has been transferred to the other non-boot drive.

Now I am noticing that I am getting the "spinning ball" quite frequently and often times for no apparent reason. Even if I eject the drive with no data it doesnt seem to help. To make matters worse, now when I open disc utilities, the spinning ball just stays there as the disc utilities window says "gathering disc information" I have waited up to 10 minutes for disc utilities to gather the information without any luck. During this time, the computer becomes unusably sluggish.

Any ideas? Im a long time mac user (apple II G was my first) but not the greatest tech person so any advice would be greatly welcome.

Thanks
Andy
 
I would recommend pulling the bad hard drive out of the computer completely. Just because it isn't mounted doesn't stop the system from trying to access it, or simply to "poll" it to see if it's online. If the hard drive is truly failing or dead, it can cause the symptoms you describe.

Disk Utility probably hangs with the spinning beachball because it's awaiting a response from the dead hard drive that the dead hard drive will never send, well, because it's dead or dying.

I would recommend pulling the drive from the machine and see if that helps.
 
I agree. There could be other problems along the way from the processor block to the hard drive -- connections, a bad bus, etc. -- that are causing the system trouble.

I'd remove the drive and restart. If the system then seems stable, you could even try putting another drive (known to be error-free) in that spot and testing whether it's really just the drive that is bad.
 
That makes total sense.....

Oye... sometimes the most obvious things just pass me by ;-)

Ill try it. Thanks
Andy
 
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