Can defective hardware damage a NEW hard drive?

[Paul A]

My iBook is a little over 5 years old. It has run perfectly until about 5 weeks ago. My hard drive failed, and failed so badly I could not access it to work on it. Disk Utility would attempt to verify, and quit saying it was too badly damaged.

I installed a new drive and thought I was done. It worked great for the last few weeks. Then, yesterday, it was acting goofy and I had to force it to shut down (Force Quit apps wouldn't launch, so I held the power button until it shut down). When I restarted all I got was the blue screen. And when I start up in Target Disk Mode (see other post), the firewire symbol doesn't bounce and the drive does not appear on the other computer--even in Disk Utility.

I suppose it is possible that my new hard drive has failed this early on, but I'm wondering if some other hardware problem could be causing this.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

 

[NewMacbookPlz]

Most definitely could be the case.

The most likely culprit I'd think would be a bad internal power supply or something along those lines, either over powering the drive (shocking it) or shorting it out somehow.

 

[chown33]

It could be that bad hardware has corrupted the data stored on the disk, and the disk itself is fine. If certain data is damaged, e.g. the partitioning data, then it may not even appear as a Firewire target disk.

Boot from the system CD and run Disk Utility there. If it shows a disk but no data, then the drive is probably OK but the data is corrupted. If it doesn't show a disk, it could be bad hardware and the disk is still OK. You'd have to pull the disk from the iBook and try it in a known good machine.

 

[Paul A]

I was finally able to boot from my external drive running the same OS software. Then I ran Disk Utilities. It didn't find any problem, and the computer is working fine. I am a little concerned that this machine is on it's way out, as this is twice in five weeks it has gone out on me. I'm also baffled by all the hours I spent trying to get it to boot up, then it finally did, and now runs perfect! Strange stuff! Any other ideas would be appreciated.

 

[old-wiz]

Smart thing would be to copy your important stuff to a backup as your HD is probably going to die soon.

 

[Paul A]

So this behavior sounds like the hard drive again? Someone else mentioned I should have "burned in" my new drive. What is that? (Oh, yes, I am backed up.)