(help pls) unknown error -20

M

mondski

Registered
hello guys!
i am new to this forum and i really do appreciate it if you could help me out.

one day...

i booted up my 12'' pwrbook 1.33, and got stuck with the gray apple and the
start-up revolving clock(?), and i shut it down.
upon restarting, i made fsck with no problems, but when i rebooted, i got stuck again, i waited but eventually had to shut it down again. this time i decided to start-up from the cd so that i could verify and/or repair permissions with disk utility, and repair volumes if ever.

i then verified and repaired the disk,
was still okay. i started-up normally and but this time, i had a freeze
after logging in to my account. re-start and then i was missing the start-up volume (folder with question mark)
start-up now with the cd and hardware test, everything was fine.
start-up again with the cd and disk utility, the Macintosh HD volume wouldn't mount, as a start-up volume, in disk utility i couldnt mount it also and when i verified/repaired it i had:
'invalid B-Tree node size' after the 2nd line of usual verifications and
'disk utility reported failure on exit -2270'
i decided to erase the volume since i had been planning to do a clean install anyway with Tiger ( i had been using 10.3.9 ) but then it took quite some time (bout 15-20 minutes) in 'preparing to zero the disk' until i had a message saying ' erase failed due to unknown error -20 .'
is my hard drive dead or something?

please help me out guys...hope there's still a chance.
i can't live without hearing the 'chooong' start-up sound & somehow
cant smile right.

thanks a lot.

mondski
quezon city
philippines
 
Could be a bad hard drive, IDE cable or IDE Controller on the logic board.
My guess, the drive is bad.
 
hello bob, thanks a lot for replying.
sorry for not getting back to you promptly, i got caught up with other things.
i've run the extended apple hardware test on it and it comes out fine.
i boot up from the cd and try to verify/repair the disk/volume with disk utility and here's the error messages:

Repairing disk for "disk0s3"
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-Tree node size
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)

Repair attempted on 1 volume
0 HFS volumes repaired
1 volume could not be repaired

I tried to erase the disk to do a clean install, but then it takes quite a long time & then:

Disk erase failed with the error:
(unknown error -20)

Well that's it. I'll be looking into what you said, bad drive, ide cable, or ide switch controller on the logic board.
Thanks again bob + have a nice day!
 
Hey Mondski, You explained my situation perfectly, I tried to erase and got the unknown error code: -20. When I tried to repair the disk, I got that same error code as you: Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972). I was wondering what you ended up doing to fix the problem? What was the outcome? Thanx
 
to: kamillion33

sorry for this late reply...haven't been going around as usual.
at this point i hope you've backed up your data.

well, after bob's advice i had it checked and yup, the HD was bad-actually it was gone already (the data can still be recovered though) & good thing i'd backed-up to an external, which i swapped.
no other option, but to have it replaced - no use trying to fix it, it'll be just delaying the inevitable.

fm: mondski
 
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