Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

G4 Clicking after co-worker accidentally handled roughly...

T

TxCreative

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 9, 2009
6
0
We have an older G4 in my office and it dropped about 2-3 inches on the rear portion when my co-worker was trying to seat it back under the desk. It immediately started making a clicking noise. It's reminiscent of the sound a CD makes when skipping. I checked the optical drive, but that seems fine.

I know someone here has way more knowledge on this than myself. Can you guide me as to what I should be checking when opening the system? I have a G5 tower at home and hadn't seen the inside of a G4 before.

Thanks for any advice!
 
K

kornyboy

macrumors 68000
Sep 27, 2004
1,529
0
Knoxville, TN (USA)
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

Sounds like it could be the hard drive. Run disk utility and see if it is about to fail.
 
xlii

xlii

macrumors 68000
Sep 19, 2006
1,867
121
Millis, Massachusetts
I second the hard drive as most likely source of the clicking. The only things that move in a laptop are:
the fans
the hard drive
the optical drive if it is in use

The hard drive is most likely to be damaged in a small drop like the one you discribe.
 
Mackilroy

Mackilroy

macrumors 68040
Jun 29, 2006
3,920
575
I agree, should be the hard drive. I had an old 250 GB that clicked, and it died pretty quickly after that. Get anything off of it ASAP.
 
T

TxCreative

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 9, 2009
6
0
kornyboy said:
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

Sounds like it could be the hard drive. Run disk utility and see if it is about to fail.
Click to expand...

Good advice...I ran disk utility and the hard drive checked out 100%. We have an air hose here so I took it back to blow anything out of the fan and just clean it out in general. When I blow air into the power supply fan, I can hear the clicking. I'm wondering if that could be my issue??
 
California

California

macrumors 68040
Aug 21, 2004
3,885
90
Disc utility is not always to be trusted in recognizing bad hard drives, but it does sound like the fan. If your hd is over three years old, time to replace it anyway. Unless you have the software override, you should get a 120gig 7200 rpm PATA drive replacement while you are thinking about it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom