Hard Drive Won't Wake in Panther

M

mindbend

Registered
After installing Panther, my third physical hard drive in a DP G4 1 Gig will not wake once it goes to sleep. I have turned off the energy saver "put hard drive to sleep when possible", but unless I force the whole system to never sleep, it [the hard drive] eventually goes to sleep and never awakens.

This effectively requires a hard reboot because the Finder will not restart or properly force quit while hanging on that drive. And other apps become pretty much useless also because when they go to a save or open window, it hangs while it waits to query the dead drive.

Any ideas?

FWIW-- I think (not sure, cuz I'm not at that machine right now) that the drive in question is at the end of an internal IDE chain. Main sys drive is on its own bus and two other IDEs are on another, with the drive in question at the end...I think.
 
I'd run some diag on the drive..make sure SMART says its okay....and if possible...run some other diag. Also maybe try switching the position on the IDE chain or the IDE cable and the power connector it's connect to...try to rule out all the easy hardware problems first :)
 
Cheryl said:
Smart?
Click to expand...
Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (S.M.A.R.T.) built into most modern ATA and SCSI disks. Mac drive utilities up to now have not done too much with this, but some are doing testing of the hard drives with routines that use SMART. I though I read, when Panther was being released, that the diskutil tools in OS X have now included some SMART routines, but I may have been reading about one of the third-party utils.
 
Do this to check the S.M.A.R.T. status: Open disk utility, then click on the hard drive you want to monitor (NOT the volume, the actual drive). Look down at the bottom of the window and you should see some basic desctiptions and information about the drive, including a "S.M.A.R.T. status" line. If it says "Verified," then S.M.A.R.T. is reporting no errors.

I had a problem with my initial install of Panther where my secondary hard drives connected to a PCI ATA card would not wake up, sending the Finder into a beachball of death loop and requiring a hard restart by way of the reset button. Since then, things have run smoothly, but I'm always waiting for it to happen again. My energy saver is set to sleep after 30 minutes, display sleep after 15 and I DO NOT have the "Spin down hard disks when possible" checked.

You may also want to check the jumpers on that drive -- some drives let you set the spindown time with a jumper, which I would disable if I found that to be the case on my machine. I would leave my drives jumpered only as master or slave with no other jumpers present.
 
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