hard drive keeps messing up

P

Phillips

Registered
I have a B&W G3 350 with 784 megs ram running 10.3.8.
Installed Panther on the 23rd. On the 26th it would hang up during the start-up
window. So it would not boot up at all.
Started off of the cd and ran utilities.
Errors found - don't remember exactly what but were fixed. But when verfied again it said errors were there and needed to fix.
Did that again.
Went to start-same thing.
Booted from cd and did the verfiy permissions. Errors found.
Fixed permissions 3 times and although said fixed same outcome at start up.
Did another clean install.
Last night did it again.
I figure the hard drive is messing up and need a new one.
New pram battery installed.
Also zapped the pram just in case.
Am I right?
 
What revision of B&W do you have (rev. 1 / rev. 2)? If it's a rev. 1, they only support one hard drive in the computer -- do you have more than one installed?

Also, what kind of hard drive is installed in the computer?

When you repair permissions, certain informational messages will appear no matter how many times you run the permissions repair... it's usually something like "We are using a special..." -- that does NOT indicate a permissions error... it is simply an informational message informing you that MAc OS X is using some non-standard permissions for certain files/folders. They will appear EVERY time you run a permissions repair. The only time a permission is repaired is if the message says something like "Permissions differ on (blah blah)" and then "The permissions on (blah blah) were repaired..."

Do you have any 3rd-party RAM in the system? Tiger is pretty picky about the RAM in the system -- if possible, remove all 3rd-party RAM leaving only the Apple-supplied RAM and see if the system behaves better that way.
 
Right now it's at college so I'm trying to do long distance repairs and remembering what's in there. It's a Rev 2 board with three hard drives.
A new WD 80 gig for files and music (slave) A 6 gig eide for operating system (master)(also it's recycled)and a 6 gig scsi for back-up for school papers.
Why a scsi, well I have had an eide just up and die before and a scsi you can tell if it's getting noisey time to back-up everything. You can almost always get them to spin "one last time".
As far as ram two 256's came from a G4 and got 2 used 128's from a friend from another B&W. When installing the 128's they had to be put in a certain order or it wouldn't start up at all. Plus one I think looked like it might have gotten hot as it had something like melted plastic on it.
It also seems to do this (crash) if left one four several hours at a time seems like no problems if just turned on used and then turned off.
I am replacing the small eide with a new large one and have a new 256 coming to replace the 2- 128's. I'm finding out the higher up you go the pickery everything gets. Particularly B&W's.
Note- also had to remove all but one 256 to install 10.3. Apple support said that's not unusual.
Your thoughts?
 
Yep, OS X is pretty picky about RAM -- and that's the first thing I would suspect. Try removing all the RAM and put in one stick at a time until you find one that works or doesn't.

The fact that some 128 sticks wouldn't work unless put in in a specific configuration leads me to believe that this is probably RAM-related. Also, don't use the 256 that looks melted. Only use known-good, high-quality RAM, and I think the problems will disappear.
 
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