Hard disc Vanished! I feel Naked!!

micart671 said:

Hello!

My 15" G4 Powerbook froze a couple days ago.
After running Apple Hardware Test i received this error report;

2STF/2/3:ATA-100ata-6-master

I have a feeling this is terminal damage?
I have zapped the PRAM and PMU...
I have tried Target disc Mode...
If it is terminal, is there any way at all of recovering lost files??

Any help at all, will be most appreciated
Thanks for your time
MiC

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Sorry, but this error is a definite drive failure. The only thing you can do is replace the drive or use an external drive as a boot drive. You will not be able to recover your files from the failed drive without the help of a Drive Recovery Service and that could be pretty expensive.

Either replace the internal drive yourself (search the web as their are many take apart guides for it) or send it out for repair to have the drive replaced.

micart671 said:

Hello,
I say thanks with a tear in my eye...
Can you please tell me, is this a light bulb situation? Do they just fail without explanation?
Also... Can you recommend a replacement?
Thanks again for your time,
Mic

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Light bulb???.

You have a drive failure and the Mac is not passing it's self test, thus the screen will not light up.

Unless you are experienced in working on PowerBooks I don't recommend you doing the replacement yourself. If it is a Titanium PB, it is not too hard to replace the drive, but if it the Aluminum PB don't even think about it. They are a royal PIA to work on.

There are 3rd party outfits on the web. Just do a Google search for Powerbook repair.

merl1n said:

Light bulb???

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He wants to know if it's his fault that the drive is failing, or if its failure is very common and unprovoked (like the failure of a light bulb).


I see a lot of threads on hard drive failure, and mine has begun to fail recently, but I think mine is due to excessive partitioning using FAT32.

Myth said:

He wants to know if it's his fault that the drive is failing, or if its failure is very common and unprovoked (like the failure of a light bulb).


I see a lot of threads on hard drive failure, and mine has begun to fail recently, but I think mine is due to excessive partitioning using FAT32.

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Woops, I missed the association. DOH!

I can only talk from experience. I have a PBG4 1.67MHZ 15" covered (not anymore though) under AppleCare. About 2 years ago, the drive died. I sent it in to Apple and they replaced it. Seven months later, the replacement drive failed. I again sent it back to Apple and again they replaced it. I have had no more issues since then with it.

To answer your previous question, yes without any damage or misuse from the user, hard drives will occasionally fail. They are rated with a MTBF (Mean-time between failure) that gives the average amount of time a hard drive is expected to last. Some go much, much longer, some go much, much earlier.

Hard drives, especially those in notebooks that get jostled around, have moving parts and therefore WILL eventually fail.

I hate to harp about backups to someone who has just lost his harddrive (I hope you have backups!), but every hard drive you have with something valuable on it should be considered a ticking time bomb, and you should definitely have redundant storage of the valuable data.

It pains me to see family pictures or videos stored on only one hard drive...WHEN the failure occurs, those memories will be gone forever.

"There are two type of people, those who back up, and those who will"

Good luck, I hope you didn't lose anything valuable except the cost to replace the hard drive!