weird clicking noise on OSX startup...

Fragger

Fragger

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I realize this doesn't belong in this forum... but since most people look here first I had to break the rules...

The deal is, I rebooted my G4 2x450 into OSX from 9 and nothing came up, soon thereafter a very very disconcerning clicking noise came from my tower. I assumed it must have been the hard drive, but I'm just wondering if anyone else has had a similar problem.

Thanks in advance...
Graham
 
when you say clicking noise, do you mean something like the click of death from a zip drive, or more like unusually loud thrashing of hd at startup? is it a regular continuous beat or more random and sporadic? diagnosing noises is by far one of the hardest things to do in a forum setting. be as specific as you can. eg - tink...tink...tink... or clumph.......clumph..clumph...clumph.........clumph.

is problem only while booting to x or is it universal? does it go away after boot? give as many details of problem as you can please.

my first guess without knowing more is that you might need to defrag and optimize the disk.
 
I also have a G4 DP450 and must say that whenever I boot into OSX 10.xx the sound of the hard drive thrashing is more than when I boot into OS 9.XX. It may have to do with the dual processors which are recognized by OS X and not by OS9. I am just guessing here, but that is the most probable explanation I can come up with.javascript:smilie(':p')
 
Dude, I had the exact same thing happen to me. After switching between startup folders (and a few times while just starting up in X), sometimes I would get a blank screen and there would be a beeping noise coming from inside my computer. It happened to me only after I tried defragging my hard drive using Norton SystemWorks. Did you happen to do that?

I too assumed it was the hard drive trying to mount or something. I just press the restart key a few times and it will eventually work. It has never caused me to not startup for more than 10 minutes. I would like to know what it is, anyone have an answer? While it was doing this, I would try starting up from a CD, and it would boot, but the HD wouldn't mount, that is why I assumed it had something to do with the hard drive.

Since this only happened after using Norton SystemWorks, I guessed the problem had been caused by the program, and still am pretty sure that is what caused it.

Your thoughts?

I have a Quicksilver G4 867, 60 GB HD (standard), 896 MB RAM.
 
madhatter - it seems strange that it would happen after a defrag! but then you used norton which is by far the least reliable of the options. what version are you using as older ones may not know just where to put x stuff?

you might also try Xoptimizer which you can find by searching www.macupdate.com or www.versiontracker.com. It prebinds all your apps to system. while it helps with launching apps more, it also seems to help with boot a little bit.

since running plusoptimizer and diskwarrior (after getting them a few weeks ago), my thrashing has been greatly reduced over any other programs i have used.
 
yes well... it was a light, just clicking noise, imagine an apple pro mouse rather heavy click, kind of a repeating triplet or something to that effect. It hasn't happened since; but many more things did.

To recap...
I was playing the Myth III demo and got a kernel panic (didn't say panic, the word exception comes to mind) resulting from a radeon related kernel module. (I can't read hex so thats what I could guess) Then I restarted into 9 so I could play without kernel panics... it froze hard and I rebooted back into 9... chose X for startup (10.1.2) and restarted.. it just sat there and didn't do anything so I concluded it froze on shutdown and hit the restart button, when It came up with a blank screen and the triplet clicking noises occurred. I restarted via the button again and 9 came up... selected X, restarted.. then X froze on startup, seemed like an infinite loop spinning/stopping rainbow (spun, froze for 30 seconds, spun... etc etc) then restarted via button and hit option on startup selected X and it booted fine. I played Myth III demo again (stupid me) got another kernel panic, this time on hard reboot I got a broken system folder icon.. having to use option startup again. [Previous to these events at some random point i always got broken folders when starting into X, I always had to do option startup..... this was fixed temporarily by 10.1 install] but now I always have to use option again.
Also, after the clicking noises... I ran Norton Utilities... it gave me some major errors about partitioning headers (I have dual booted LinuxPPC 2000) so I fixed that. Then it gave me a message saying it couldn't continue. So I ran disk first aid, and it fixed stuff (we all know how specific apple disk utilities are about what they do)and ran norton again. It decided to work this time and corrected some more partition stuff. Then I Ran speed disk (optimize/defrag) and it froze halfway through.
So yah... this sucks...
by they way.. im a dual g4 450, 256 Ram, radeon... and am very aggravated. Please give advice on what went wrong, and how I can avoid the damn option startup thing.

Thanks,
Graham
 
I'm opening my case as I write this.. well not as I write it but close enough... hold on and I will check...

No it appears to be a Maxtor...

But all drives tend to do the same things before they die... which reminds me, I should have taken pictures of what me and my friend did to a hard drive that broke... we broke it a lot more...

thanks,
graham
 
Graham - you might get norton to complete the job if you give it more memory -as much as you can spare since it will be the only program running besides your system. seems it is set up to handle about a 10mb disk and no more from my experience. you must do this to disk doctor and speed disk , not just utilities or system works. probably a good idea to do this to all your norton tools individually while you're at it.

techtool pro and plusoptimizer/diskwarrior have always finished the job. techtool pro is limited if you have a file bigger than the largest available free space and will only defrag, not optimize, under that condition. plusoptimizer just leaves the big file and optimizes everthing else. it also id's the file(s) at the end so you can remove it and redo.

btw - the sound does seem like it could be thrashing from the way you describe it.
 
well all I can say is that it hasn't happened since, so I'm just gonna let it be for a while. After all, playing jenga with a system can result in headaches.

Thanks for your help,
graham (fragger)
 
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