Hi all --
Hope this post won't be as long as my day has ....
I live in France and my nearest authorized dealer is 200 miles away, so I've been on the phone with support a couple of times and gone through various hoops. Now I'm hoping you can help me avoid a 3-hr drive.
Two days ago, my hard drive (or CPU?) started acting up. My Macbook Pro (bought May 07, 2.16 GHz, running 10.4.11) took a long time to boot, and then my desktop image appeared as a fragment along the top of the screen. Various processes started to hang the machine, during which time a repetitive sequence of ticking could be heard from inside the machine until whatever was wrong resolved itself. There were no program crashes and in fact the machine operated fine inbetween these hangs. I ran an extended hardware test, no problems there. Disk Utility, however, would not complete its verification, saying "the underlying task reported failure on exit". It stated that the HD needed to be repaired. However, the "repair disk" button was greyed out, disallowing the repair.
TechTool showed the directory scan failed, as did the volume structure test.
I tried numerous times to Safeboot, but the computer crashed (simply turned off suddenly) midway into the boot each time.
Apple Support had me zap the PRAM, clear the caches, and do that 15-second power-button thing with the battery out. All the log-in items that might have been slowing the boot were removed. This succeeded in getting the machine to boot faster and the desktop image returned.
However, both Verify Disk and TechTool showed the same problems, saying the disk needs to be repaired.
I have since backed everything up and would like to try to resolve this myself rather than driving it to the service centre. What are my next steps? I'd like to somehow avoid a clean install and have to reload everything ...
Thanks for your feedback.
barksducks
Hope this post won't be as long as my day has ....
I live in France and my nearest authorized dealer is 200 miles away, so I've been on the phone with support a couple of times and gone through various hoops. Now I'm hoping you can help me avoid a 3-hr drive.
Two days ago, my hard drive (or CPU?) started acting up. My Macbook Pro (bought May 07, 2.16 GHz, running 10.4.11) took a long time to boot, and then my desktop image appeared as a fragment along the top of the screen. Various processes started to hang the machine, during which time a repetitive sequence of ticking could be heard from inside the machine until whatever was wrong resolved itself. There were no program crashes and in fact the machine operated fine inbetween these hangs. I ran an extended hardware test, no problems there. Disk Utility, however, would not complete its verification, saying "the underlying task reported failure on exit". It stated that the HD needed to be repaired. However, the "repair disk" button was greyed out, disallowing the repair.
TechTool showed the directory scan failed, as did the volume structure test.
I tried numerous times to Safeboot, but the computer crashed (simply turned off suddenly) midway into the boot each time.
Apple Support had me zap the PRAM, clear the caches, and do that 15-second power-button thing with the battery out. All the log-in items that might have been slowing the boot were removed. This succeeded in getting the machine to boot faster and the desktop image returned.
However, both Verify Disk and TechTool showed the same problems, saying the disk needs to be repaired.
I have since backed everything up and would like to try to resolve this myself rather than driving it to the service centre. What are my next steps? I'd like to somehow avoid a clean install and have to reload everything ...
Thanks for your feedback.
barksducks
