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Big problems with Tiger (hopefully)

E

Elbeano

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 21, 2004
131
0
PA
I usually only read stuff here, so I'm hoping I'm not putting this in the wrong place.

Short story. I get tiger yesterday, do an update (not archive and install or a fresh install since I wasn’t really familiar with the difference since I’m fairly new to mac. I subsequently had it explained to me by a more mac-savvy friend). First little problem came from iTunes being a little glitchy last night. Now… today, I get home from work, and the hard drive is sounding a little funky. Everything seems fine, but a little choppy.

The big problem came while I had safari open, iTunes playing, and I was using iChat. I went to do something in iTunes, and it wouldn’t respond. I tried right clicking the icon in the dock, and the dock froze. Tried open apple alt-option escape, and nothing. After 10 minutes, I did a hard restart. It took 15 minutes to restart. I restarted it again, that’s an old windows trick where problems would just mysteriously go away if you restarted directly after a restart. It worked once on my mac before, so I figured I’d give it a go. No dice, another 15 minutes. Now, I’m getting annoyed. After hearing my friend talk about the archive and install, I thought maybe I should give that a go, so I’d have a nice fresh OS on my machine, and just be out 4.5 gig.

I start the reinstallation process, and it stops for a good half an hour on “verifying disk”. Never went any further. I try a hard restart again, and now it won’t boot. It’s stuck on what I have no come to call the “gray apple screen of death, with the spinning timer thing”. It’s been stuck there while I’ve been typing this.

What do you guys think?


oh, by the way, my one year warranty has been up for about 2 weeks, and I would have had to buy apple care already if I had wanted it... that ship has sailed. I'm also stuck on a PC for the time being... blech
 
Sounds like a faulty HD to me!
Try booting from the CDs and running disk utility etc.
You may loose all your stuff - to prevent this you may have to go to a pro who will save data from disks - sorry! :(

P.S. - To boot from the CD, get the CD in somehow (usually opens soon after pushing power button if you hold eject key down - close the same way), restart or power off/on and then hold the "c" key down as the Mac boots up
 
this is a sad sad day for me after I got done proclaiming the glories of tiger to anyone who would listen in the past 48 hours... now what am I to tell them?

it's still gathering disk information, what should I do after that?
 
James Philp said:
Sounds like a faulty HD to me!
Try booting from the CDs and running disk utility etc.
You may loose all your stuff - to prevent this you may have to go to a pro who will save data from disks - sorry! :(

P.S. - To boot from the CD, get the CD in somehow (usually opens soon after pushing power button if you hold eject key down - close the same way), restart or power off/on and then hold the "c" key down as the Mac boots up
Click to expand...

You can press and hold the mouse button to eject the CD tray.

Sounds like a bad timing of the hard drive dying. My iMac had an issue where it wouldn't get an IP from ethernet. Turns out, the cable had died between Panther and the Tiger Setup Assistant.
 
It depend what it says!? If it's doing that for a while you may have a faulty HD! :( It may not be Tiger that's at fault, it may be hardware.
If there's stuff on the mac that is absolutely vital to you, or you're rich enough, take it to someone to salvage the information they can from the HD.
If you're not bothered about loosing EVERYTHING, then you may want to try the clean install feature in the Tiger installation disc to see if that solves the problem.
If you have a lot of music then the iPod can give you back whatever it has using an app called PodWorks once you're up and running again.
I feel your pain my friend, I too had to completely re-install the OS once (back in the 10.2 days) and lost it all - MAJOR bummer man! (Again, I had disk issues - the DVD drive, it seemed to all stem from a bad External Firewire HD)

If you have a friend with a mac handy you can try connecting a firewire cable between the two Macs, shutting yours down and then starting it up while pressing the "t" key to see what they can salvage - they may even be able to fix the problems, you never know!

Again, sorry! :(
 
Try to boot to single user mode (hold command + S at powerup). You'll see a bunch of text running up the screen. When it finishes, a prompt will come up. Then run fsck to try to repair any problems (there is even a short blurb about how to do this just before the prompt comes up... you'll see it). After running fsck, type reboot (I think); computer will then restart. Then let the joy resume. Hope that helps.
 
Right now it's still in "gathering disk information", and the hard drive is making noise, so I'm just going to let it go for a little while longer. Compared to some of the problems I had with PC, this is light, but still annoying. I came to mac to try to avoid stuff like this, but if it's with hardware, there isn't a lot that can be done. It's still nothing compared to the time that I accidentally formatted my media hard drive while I was installing XP on one of my older computers. Recovering a formatted hard drive is not my idea of a weekend of fun, but I did it. Honestly though... other than some pictures (most of which are backed up somewhere), I have everything else backed up, so it's not going to be the worst thing in the world if I lose it all.

On that note, I'm not shy when it comes to opening a machine up, since I used to build PCs. Who's got some hard drive suggestions to replace my theoretically faulty one with (12" pb rev C)? That won't be going back to apple... not since my warranty is up.
 
PS dont do that double-restart thing again!
If it's still doing the gathering, there it obviously a problem.
If you're not loosing anything do a clean install of tiger and see how that goes before mucking about with hardware.
 
I'm giving archive and install one more go, it read how much free space there is on the disk... so I'm still holding out a little hope
 
it has actually made it to "preparing OS X" in the installation process. I shall keep my fingers crossed

time remaining: 6 hours and 40 minutes...
 
MacWerx said:
:eek:

Crikey! There seems to be some sort of problem there! I installed mine in about half an hour!
Click to expand...

well it's already down to under 4 hours... I wonder what other 1.33ghz 12" PB users were getting for time on their archive and install installations
 
Wait...you're doing an archive and install after having ridiculously slow hard drive performance? You really ought to find out if your HD is failiing or not using disk utility. If it *isn't* you really ought to find a way to get your data off it and reformat it. What you're describing isn't going to be solved by re-installing if the install itself is behaving in this fashion! :(

FWIW, iBook G4/800, archive and install took approximately 40-60 minutes. PB should be slightly faster. That was without importing users, but still... Archive and install should not take you much more than an hour.
 
Elbeano said:
well it's already down to under 4 hours... I wonder what other 1.33ghz 12" PB users were getting for time on their archive and install installations
Click to expand...


24 minutes. Your hard drive, buddy-boy, is toastier than my breakfast. Not good. :eek:
 
know where I can get one installed if I buy a new one??? they won't do it at an apple store if I bring one in, will they? and how much would it cost if I just got one of theirs?
 
it gave up with an hour and 24 minutes left... said there were errors with the installation and I should try again
 
man, sounds like you have hardware failure. i wish you luck and keep us updated on your situation. i hope it works out!!!!
 
Elbeano said:
Right now it's still in "gathering disk information", and the hard drive is making noise, so I'm just going to let it go for a little while longer. Compared to some of the problems I had with PC, this is light, but still annoying. I came to mac to try to avoid stuff like this, but if it's with hardware, there isn't a lot that can be done. It's still nothing compared to the time that I accidentally formatted my media hard drive while I was installing XP on one of my older computers. Recovering a formatted hard drive is not my idea of a weekend of fun, but I did it. Honestly though... other than some pictures (most of which are backed up somewhere), I have everything else backed up, so it's not going to be the worst thing in the world if I lose it all.

On that note, I'm not shy when it comes to opening a machine up, since I used to build PCs. Who's got some hard drive suggestions to replace my theoretically faulty one with (12" pb rev C)? That won't be going back to apple... not since my warranty is up.
Click to expand...

If you have to get a new drive, might as well upgrade and get a hitachi 7200rpm drive! If you have a compusa or microcenter nearby, give em a call and ask if they offer the service if you buy it from someone else. Good luck.
-Dave
 
Definitely a bad drive... sounds exactly like what happened to mine about 2 months ago. I have a G4/800 iBook, and at the Apple Store it cost $323 to get it replaced. If you're comfortable opening it up on your own or having someplace other than Apple do it, shop around -- I suspect I overpaid!

Oh, and be careful trying target disk mode (see John Philip, above) -- I did that to save my data before my drive was completely toast, and it took forever, to begin with, and also totally mucked up permissions on the second machine.

Good luck to you!
 
cleo said:
Definitely a bad drive... sounds exactly like what happened to mine about 2 months ago. I have a G4/800 iBook, and at the Apple Store it cost $323 to get it replaced. If you're comfortable opening it up on your own or having someplace other than Apple do it, shop around -- I suspect I overpaid!
Click to expand...

What kind of hard drive did you get for the $320? The same as you had before, and was it ~40GB, or was it something substantially bigger/faster/stronger/better?
 
I'm going to agree with some of the posters and say that this sounds like a definite harddrive problem. My harddrive crapped out on my not too long ago and the initial symptoms were exactly the same -- complete lock-up and then an interminable boot up. Eventually, I just got a blank gray screen instead of the apple screen. I was also getting the ball bearing sound coming from the drive, which is the equivalent of death throes (I didn't notice you hearing this, but it's another tell tale sign).

My advice is to slave your computer to another Mac via firewire (connect the two computers, and then boot the dying one holding down the T key), copy all of your essential files, and then get a new drive.
 
well... I'm on a fresh install. I reformatted, lost everything, but I'm back up and running. However, Xbench disk test is at 30.75... if that doesn't sound good, I still may have some problem. I'm still taking suggestions.
 
cleo said:
Oh, and be careful trying target disk mode (see John Philip, above) -- I did that to save my data before my drive was completely toast, and it took forever, to begin with, and also totally mucked up permissions on the second machine.

Good luck to you!
Click to expand...
Who's John Philip? :p Clea!
 
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