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jeffy.dee-lux

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 19, 2003
721
0
montreal
hahaha, i always wanted to use that term. Anyways, there i was playing quake 3 the other night, and my 500mhz imac freezes, fps counter goes to 0. I try force quitting for a while, nothing happens, so i'm forced to shut it off cold, first time i did that i think since i installed osX last fall. Start it back up, and uhh... yeah.. didn't work out so well, didn't get passed the screen with the apple logo and the spinning flower type thing. I started up from the Jaguar CD, took quite a while, then i use disk utility. Verify the disk, it tells me the volume "&#" or something needs to be repaired. So i click repair, that takes about 2 seconds, then its done, but it still tells me "&#" needs to be repaired. So i start up from the norton cd (thank you in advance to everyone who tells me norton sucks...), run disk doctor... It finishes checking all the files on my computer in about a second, which is somewhat disconcerting... The thing gets stuck while checking the directories or structures or something, i suppose maybe i should've written that one down. Just out of curiousity, i started up Speed Disk, and unfortunately it didn't list my HD as one of the disks that could be defragmented, not that doing that would help anyways.

So i'm just gonna bring the thing into the local mac resaler, with whom we've had so so experience before. This is a 40GB HD that we got installed there about exactly a year ago, after the old one went crazy, apparently cause we never ran any defragmenting software (this was under os9). We had an incident somewhat similar to this one back in the fall, after some video editing, they told us the drive became too fragmented, which is interesting since we were on osX then and everyone seems to say you don't need to defragment under osX. The drive was and is still only about 50% full.

When disk doctor was running, before it came up to that big scary error. it did repair some other "major" errors, i didn't take down what they were though, stupid me. Do you guys run something like disk doctor on a regular basis to fix errors that come up? I've been using macjanitor to run those daily weekly and monthly cleaning up tasks. So do you think this is just due to poor maintenance? Or do you think there's something physically wrong with the HD that they gave us last year?
 

Dont Hurt Me

macrumors 603
Dec 21, 2002
6,055
6
Yahooville S.C.
no idea but it is interesting,my wife has a 500 Imac and it to had a drive go out in about a year. Apple gave us a new one which also just went out 2 weeks ago so i just put in a barracuda 40 gb. So the Imac is on its 3rd Drive in 3 years. My Quicksilver's IBM Drive is a little older,gets used way more and never a problem. Brands of drives? Imac firmware? the OS? or just crappy made drives?
I allways wonder when they changed out the drive the first time did we get a new one or somebody elses drive?
 

Les Kern

macrumors 68040
Apr 26, 2002
3,063
76
Alabama
I've had that happen before, and once it required me to send it to drivesavers to get some critical data. Unless you have data you need, just get a new drive for under $100.00. A rarer event is a motherboard problem. If you have the original Apple disks use the diagnostic tool.
 

Crikey

macrumors 6502
Jan 14, 2004
356
0
Spencer's Butte, Oregon
thermal issues?

I wonder if the temperature inside an iMac gets high enough to shorten the useful life of hard drives? I'm a huge fan of quiet computers (no pun intended), but there is a trade off between the cooling you get with lots of noisy fans and the quiet you get without them. It would be nice if there were temperature sensors built into hard drives and a way to read the temperature using software, so one could investigate this hypothesis.

Cheers,


Crikey
 

Sparky's

macrumors 6502a
Feb 11, 2004
871
0
jeffy.dee-lux said:
hahaha, i always wanted to use that term. Anyways, there i was playing quake 3 the other night, and my 500mhz imac freezes, fps counter goes to 0. I try force quitting for a while, nothing happens, so i'm forced to shut it off cold, first time i did that i think since i installed osX last fall. Start it back up, and uhh... yeah.. didn't work out so well, didn't get passed the screen with the apple logo and the spinning flower type thing. I started up from the Jaguar CD, took quite a while, then i use disk utility. Verify the disk, it tells me the volume "&#" or something needs to be repaired. So i click repair, that takes about 2 seconds, then its done, but it still tells me "&#" needs to be repaired. So i start up from the norton cd (thank you in advance to everyone who tells me norton sucks...), run disk doctor... It finishes checking all the files on my computer in about a second, which is somewhat disconcerting... The thing gets stuck while checking the directories or structures or something, i suppose maybe i should've written that one down. Just out of curiousity, i started up Speed Disk, and unfortunately it didn't list my HD as one of the disks that could be defragmented, not that doing that would help anyways.

So i'm just gonna bring the thing into the local mac resaler, with whom we've had so so experience before. This is a 40GB HD that we got installed there about exactly a year ago, after the old one went crazy, apparently cause we never ran any defragmenting software (this was under os9). We had an incident somewhat similar to this one back in the fall, after some video editing, they told us the drive became too fragmented, which is interesting since we were on osX then and everyone seems to say you don't need to defragment under osX. The drive was and is still only about 50% full.

Couple of things, have you tried (from the install CD) changing the startup disk and booting to OS 9? then running Norton. I am an avid beliver in Norton on OS 9 and do understand the reason why running Norton or other defrag software in OS X is not good. In the old days (ha) of HDs that were 20gb and less a drive could get filled up pretty quick, and defrag was used to straighten everything out. Just as when in OS 9 you should always quit out of apps in the reverse order you started them so your RAM wouldn't fragment. But these days with HDs in the 60 80 and higher gb range the odds of files needing to fragmnet is seldom and with "journaling" in OS X running the self fixing goes on in the background so you don't need to override it by using defrag software.
Another thing to consider is how the new HD you put in was formatted. This article may help:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=21103

good luck
 

jeffy.dee-lux

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 19, 2003
721
0
montreal
thanks everyone for your suggestions and so forth. yeah, i'd really like to get disk warrior, since last time we brought the computer in, all they did was use disk warrior on it and reinstall the os. I'll give that os9 thing a shot when i get home, although i'm not even sure if i can start up in os9 at all, since when i boot up from the 10.2 cd, all i get is the installer and disk utility. But i'm really curious about that heat issue, i've wondered about that quite a lot. I love how quiet this computer is, but if it causes this much of a pain in the neck, its really not worth it. From the way nothing seems to be able to even see or check any files on the disk, it makes me think that it might be something physically wrong with the hard drive. i hope so anyways, cause this drive is less than a year old and should still be under warranty.
 
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