Crashing Quad, not the usual problem

[burnout8488]

Once every few weeks, my Quad will crash when I'm not using it. It is on most of the day, and when I come back to it, the fans will be spinning at full bore.

After turning it off and rebooting, it will boot to the apple logo, then shut down.

If booted in verbose mode, it says "syncing disks... killing all processes... CPU halted" and shuts down.

If I put it in Target Disk Mode and hook my PowerBook up to it, the PB says the disk cannot be repaired and must be reformatted. Essentially, telling me it's f*cked. Never seen such a harsh disk error before in OSX.

The ONLY thing that fixes this problem is when I run Disk Warrior on the PowerBook via firewire. It rebuilds the Quad's HD, and it will boot normally for a few weeks then.

Can anyone shed some light on what might be causing this? I am running a single Samsung HD103SJ 1TB Hard drive.

 

[Hrududu]

Well it really just sounds like a failing HDD. Drives go bad more often than I think people tend to believe. Maybe give the SATA cable a check and make sure its not damaged. Honestly, I would say it really sounds like a bad drive.

 

[adcx64]

Do you have another drive to try?

 

[burnout8488]

It's actually quite new, only a few months old, and I used another HD103SJ prior to this when they were in RAID-0.

I just find it odd that a hard drive could cause the computer to randomly crash when sitting at the desktop, is that possible?

I could try my old Maxtor that came with the computer originally, but it will take weeks, or maybe even a month of running to know if the problem is fixed. It sucks, because the problem takes so long to surface.

 

[Nameci]

I agree it could be that your hdd is starting to exhibit symptoms of failure. Better back up data. It doesn't mean that even if it is just months old it could not fail. It will fail no matter what, we cannot tell when. It is highly unlikely but it will.