Is My Hard Drive Dying?

T

toxictaipan

Registered
Hello, everyone.


A few nights ago my iBook G4 has started freezing up randomly. It first happened when listening to music on my iTunes. It just started to skip, like a CD would. I thought that it might have been just that song so I tried to click on a different one, only to find out that my computer was completely frozen. Held the power button until it turned off, booted it back up, and it did it again after a few minutes.


It's been happening at different times. Most of the times it freezes at the blue screen right before it says "Starting Mac OS X" and the log in screen. But it has done it as early as the silver screen with the apple logo and the spinning wheel. Sometimes (although it's a rare occasion), I can get it to log in and use it for a little before freezing.


Everything still seems to be there, so I don't believe I've lost any data. However, it's not really any good if I can't use my computer without it freezing up on me in a couple minutes, or if I can't even log in.





So, my question is, what can I do to fix it? Is my hard drive just about to die? Is it something else? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
 
How much hard disk space is free? If less than 10% is free, you're especially liable for unusual slowness and freezes. How much memory do you have as well?
 
earthsaver said:
How much hard disk space is free? If less than 10% is free, you're especially liable for unusual slowness and freezes. How much memory do you have as well?
Click to expand...
I have 256 MB of RAM. And I'm not sure exactly how much space I had free on the hard drive, but it was between about 30-35 GB, on a 55 GB hard drive.
 
256 MB of RAM? While the RAM may not be the only reason for the slowness, get more. That will make the Mac much faster to use. 256 MB with ANY version of Mac OS X is painful.

Do you have the install discs that came with that computer? Doing the hardware test (on one of those discs) would not be a bad thing.
 
Giaguara said:
256 MB of RAM? While the RAM may not be the only reason for the slowness, get more. That will make the Mac much faster to use. 256 MB with ANY version of Mac OS X is painful.

Do you have the install discs that came with that computer? Doing the hardware test (on one of those discs) would not be a bad thing.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I know. But it was running fine before all of this happened. I really don't think it's because of the RAM. And, to be honest, I'm reluctant to spend any money on it if I'm not absolutely sure it will fix it. As you can see, I'm pretty much in need of a new computer, anyway.

Also, no, I don't have the install disk.

earthsaver said:
If you don't have an install disc, you can start in safe boot or single user mode and repair some directory problems on your hard disk.
Click to expand...
I'm having the same problem trying to start it up in Safe Mode.

I started single user mode, and used fsck, and I got the message "** The volume (name_of_volume) appears to be OK"
 
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