OS X keeps freezing/pausing on iBook G4

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kingslyj

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My 2004 ibook G4's hdd crashed/died and Apple wanted US$300+service charges for a 30GB hard disk. So I decided to fix it myself and put in a 80GB Seagate hard disk(about US$100 and 3yr warranty as opposed to Apple's 1year.).

I installed OS X Panther from the DVD I got with the system and I find that it keeps freezing/pausing for no apparent reason. The GUI stops responding and the cursor turns into the spinning beachball... after a while everything starts working again... until the next freeze.
(There are atleast 2 freezes even before I get to login)

I don't see any details in system logs.

I thought it might have something to do with the hard disk, so I tried booting into single user mode and did an "ls -lR /" and it worked flawlessly with no freeze/pause at all characters scrolling past faster than I can read!.(Did it multiple times to be certain it wasn't a fluke)

Whereas in the GUI, even starting up "Terminal" results in a freeze most of the time. And an "ls -lR /" takes ages and has multiple freezes.

Google and reading up various forums on the net seemed to suggest
that it was probably a memory problem. Tried removing the extra RAM stick with no change.

I've re-installed the OS nearly a dozen times in various configs including a default install(yes/next to all questions) on a single volume spanning the whole 80GB and it still keeps freezing.

I decided to try the Ubuntu PPC version and found that it worked flawlessly... I've been using it for nearly a month now with no problems whatsoever(everything except the modem works) So it doesn't seem to be a hardware issue.

Has anyone experienced similar problems before ? Any tips/pointers?
 
I would suspect the hard drive that you purchased is the problem. Or that something isn't fully making contact on the inside -- check the hard drive data cable.
 
aren't the DVDs that are shipped with machines specific to their hardware setups? perhaps there's a mismatch with what the install is expecting, and what hdd is actually there?
 
@macworks
I doubt it's a loose contact since it works fine under linux I've tried reading/writing 1GB of data to the disk without any problems.

@lombarke
yes it says iBook on it, but then there are no OS drivers for harddisks afaik. the drivers are only for the IDE controllers and that hasn't changed.

Is it possible to make OS X logs more verbose ?
 
Perhaps, but it should not have an effect on the hard drive. I've installed countless replacement hard drives in all models of iBooks and PowerBooks over the years and I can tell you with confidence that I've never had a problem. As long as the drive is a Parallel ATA drive, you should be fine. I prefer to buy Hitachi Travelstar drives, but will settle for a Seagate if I can't get the Hitachi. I never consider Fujitsu or Toshiba drives as I've pulled too many dead ones out.
 
kingslyj said:
@macworks
I doubt it's a loose contact since it works fine under linux I've tried reading/writing 1GB of data to the disk without any problems.

@lombarke
yes it says iBook on it, but then there are no OS drivers for harddisks afaik. the drivers are only for the IDE controllers and that hasn't changed.

Is it possible to make OS X logs more verbose ?
Click to expand...

yea it was a shot in the dark. how did you format the drive?
 
I used Disk Utilty from within the installer DVD.

I have 4 HFS+ journalled partitions/volumes and another one was converted into ext3+swap by the ubuntu installer.

But the problem existed even when I did an install with a single 80GB volume.
 
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