Hard drive failed?

[davidigor]

I have a G4 ibook, 933Mhz. I have OSX 10.4.10. I hope the following is not too much information:

I was working on a Word doc. I was connected to the internet. Word froze, and I could not force quit. I turned it off using the power button, then started up again. At startup, I got the chime and a blue screen, but no spinning wheel. I repeated the process and it stopped at the Apple logo.

I found a 10.4 install disk and tried disk repair utilities. I tried verifying and got "checking HFS plus volume, checking extents overflow file, and checking catalog file." then, in red, it said "keys out of order," and "The volume Mac HD needs to be repaired."

When I chose repair, I got the message: "Error: the underlying task reported failure on exit." I clicked repair again, and got this message: "repairing disk failed with error. Could not unmount disk.

So I decided to reinstall. When I got to "Select Destination Disk" the hard drive was listed, and it listed it as having 93 GB, with 79GB free. It had the message that "some volumes are unavailable until the installer has finished processing." It processed for over 45 minutes before allowing me to select the hard drive. I chose the hard drive and clicked install, but the install failed-I forget the message. It suggested I try again by clicking restart. I did, but it showed no disks to choose from.

I started over, attempting disk repair again. After a 30 minute wait, it listed the hard drive. I attempted repair, and it ended with these messages: the volumbe Mac HD could not be repaired. Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit. 1 HFS volume checked. 1 volume could not be repaired because of an error. Repair attempted on 1 volume. 1 volume could not be repaired.

One more trip back to install, and it never offers a volume to choose to install on.

Another trip back to first aid; it still recognizes the hard drive and attempts to repair, but the same error message appears as before.

All I really want to know is whether this can be solved by replacing the hard drive. I have not lost data that I'm very concerned about; I just want to know if a new part is the appropriate solution to this, or whether there may be another action I can take?

It is probably clear that I have limited diagnostic skills when it comes to this. Is this a hard-drive failure? Could it be anything else? I don't mind replacing the hard drive, if that's what it is.

Thanks for your time.

David

 

[Satcomer]

Well the best you could do is have something like Alsoft's Disk Warrior and try to repair the disk. Disk Warrior IMHO is the best disk application on OS X, period!

Now on the OLD iBook (it IS old) the drive might have failed. On older machine it is not if a drive will fail, it is WHEN it will fail! So did you have backup or use Time Machine (10.5 only)? I bet you didn't and are regretting it now (that was a joke, live & learn).

You will be spending some money to replace that drive. Now what you will need is a replacement drive, a Firewire backup drive (so in the future you will have a BOOT ABLE backup). To replace the drive you should take a look at the iFixIt guide and get the hard drive from OWC. Plus get a Firewire 400 drive from OWC (because they include all the cables you need). Then in 10.4.x use the free Carbon copy cloner or the shareware Super Duper and make regular boot able backups.

Good luck.

 

[Satcomer]

Also why did you post the same problem twice?

 

[davidigor]

Thanks for your suggestions. The issue is not so much whether I have backups for my data, but whether I can keep alive the laptop which, though old, meets my needs just fine. But thank you very much for your time and your input. I guess I will look for the disk repair software and the various items you mentioned and see what I can afford. And the double post was an accident-it probably happened because I went back in and used an edit feature after I was done.