Hard drive failing?

[comda]

Greetings Mac Rumors!

A few months ago, i made a post on the PowerPC page telling you about my $40 Emac. Specs are PowerPC 1.42Ghz, 1Gb DDr ram, 80Gb Hard drive and Combo Drive. The only issue i had with it was the combo drive not always opening.. But last night after it sat for about 2 months i fired it up and opened up safari in Leopard to play some youtube remixes as i cleaned up my living room. It played the music for about a good half hour until i approached it wanting to turn down the volume for a moment. It did nothing. I then tried to close the web browser thinking flash overloaded the Power PC CPu, but nothing. Force quit wouldnt do a think it was locked up. First time a mac has done this to me...So i left it for a sec and the music stopped and after i few moments i tried again. Nothing. So i held down the power button on the thing and it shut off. I left it for a few more minutes and came back and powered it on again...All i get now is the folder indicating no boot drive.. Is the drive dead? Why would it just freeze up like that on me? Let me know. Thanks

 

[Intell]

That is very likely a hard drive failure. It would freeze up like that because the running system asked the hard drive for some data and was wanting for it to arrive. When it never did, the system froze waiting for the data.

 

[comda]

Great -_- . so now i guess i gotta tear the thing apart and replace that 80gb ide hard drive..

 

[128keaton]

Great -_- . so now i guess i gotta tear the thing apart and replace that 80gb ide hard drive..

Its worth it to put in a modern one. I put a 260GB 7200RPM Maxtor in my G3, no regrets. Very fast!

 

[comda]

Well. I just got my hands on 2 free 80gb seagate barracuda's. 7200rpm. Only thing is... Is the drive in there really dead? Is there a way to test it?

 

[128keaton]

Well. I just got my hands on 2 free 80gb seagate barracuda's. 7200rpm. Only thing is... Is the drive in there really dead? Is there a way to test it?

Yes, boot to an install DVD and run repair with Disk Utility.

 

[weckart]

deleted

 

[comda]

I have 10.5.8 on the system but ran the Tiger (10.4.8) DVD i have and disk utility found nothing other then the DVD drive.. Now i connected the emac to my macbok running leopard to see if anything is readable but the emac is in target disk mode and my mac isn't showing anything. what now? ive heard of an apple diagnostics dvd..

 

[Intell]

You have to replace the hard drive. It's likely that all data on it is now lost and not recoverable, unless you pay a large fee to a third party data recovery service.

 

[comda]

Thats just terrific.. (Sarcasm) Funny thing was when i was buying it, it had an issue of booting to the tiger load window and freezing. The guy said it was an easy fix but he was to lazy. I told him i maybe the hard drive but he said and i quote "nope. I used to run a computer store. iF the Hard drive isnt clicking its working" BS! well guess i gotta rip this thing apart now.. Any tips before i do so.

 

[Intell]

Make you you follow the instructions on opening the eMac properly. Don't mess with the CRT, even unplugged it can still kill a person.

 

[comda]

That makes me feel great about peeking into it..

 

[Intell]

You may want to read about what it takes to replace an eMac hard drive before you start. You can read about it at iFixit.com. If it isn't something you feel that you can do, you could always pass the eMac on to another that can do it.

 

[comda]

well. I bought it so i could fix it. Im a guy that enjoys a challenge so as soon as i get some free time before school, its getting a new hard drive and a fresh load of OSX. Thanks for confirming my suspicion of a dead hard drive.

 

[bunnspecial]

quote "nope. I used to run a computer store. iF the Hard drive isnt clicking its working"

I've encountered my fair share of dead drives with the "click of death."

I've also had plenty of HDDs that I declared dead due to less conspicuous problems that none the less rendered them unusable.

I have a Maxtor 160gb IDE HDD that I wanted to use as the boot drive in my G4 Quicksilver. I put it in the QS, formatted it, and proceed to run Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer everything over. I did this at about 10:00 one evening, and came back the next morning to find that CCC had only managed to copy about half the data(20gb or so) after 10 hours.

I finally managed to get a full clone onto the drive, only to have a kernel panic when I tried to boot off of it. Running disk utility gave me a list of errors a mile long, and reported to me that it couldn't repair the drive.

A couple of cycles of this, and I finally decided that the drive was-for all intents and purposes-dead.

Back in the spring, my Macbook Pro(my primary, every day computer)started running really, really slow. The Apple Store played with it for a week, and after watching it struggle for ~20 minutes with a fresh install of Lion(and next to no progress), the Genius finally decided that he was going to drop a new hard drive in it. The computer was immediately good as new.

One final story-I have a Powermac 7100 that I got for free, and which I've been fighting with for 3-4 weeks to get running. It would not boot off the hard drive. After booting off a CD and reformatting, I tried various OS installs with everything from OS 7.5 to OS 9. All the installs would slow to a crawl, and if they did manage to install completely, the computer would not boot. I bought a couple of SCSI drives off Ebay the other day, and stuck one in the computer last night. The drive I put in was an OEM Apple drive, and the computer immediately booted to OS 8.1 with no problems at all when I powered it up. So, I think I can also safely write off the original SCSI drive in this computer as being dead.

 

[comda]

Well. On a positive note i didnt have anything on the hard drive but osx. It was a fresh install 2 months ago.. So dont really care. What i do care about is the sticking dvd combo drive and the fact i have to spend some time tearing into it. Likr i said i have 2 hard drives i brought from a local computer shop for free. They spin up and have partitions. But how to really scan and check for bad sectors before i install it on the mac?