Does this error mean hard drive failure?

[p0intblank]

My friend's iBook G3 has been having issues lately so I booted via Verbose Mode to see what's going on. Eventually I see something like disk: I/O error. Does this mean the hard drive is going? I'm having trouble booting into any OS I install on it. It will boot off my 3G iPod so I'm guessing it's not a logic board issue.

Oh and by the way, the SMART status of the drive is Verified.

Thanks!

 

[Super Macho Man]

It could be a bad HD or it could be a corrupt filesystem or disk structure in which case you'd want to try repartitioning, reformatting, reinstalling. (Don't know if you've already tried 1 and 2 in addition to 3)

 

[mkrishnan]

It could theoretically also be a drive controller failure, although that's rare. A firewire iPod doesn't use the internal PATA drive controller.

When you say you can't boot off any OS you install, have you actually repartitioned the hard drive and reformatted it, and still had problems? If so, it's almost certainly hardware somewhere along the chain.

 

[p0intblank]

It finally works! I did the order Super Macho Man suggested and it seems to have worked. I did it via FireWire Target Disk Mode from my PowerBook. Booting was a little slow, so I was worried... but it made it through. I installed all the updates and it's working just.

Thank you so much for the help!