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Harddrive Problem?????

E

ElectricMan5

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 22, 2008
204
0
I have a PowerBook G4 titanium with 800Mhz and 512mbs of ram, and my computer has recently been crashing. It starts to click, and the little swirly thing appears, then totally freezes and i have to force shutdown by holding the power button. Is my harddrive dying? i'm currently backing it up onto a 500gb external harddrive... would i be able to boot from this and use it if my harddrive totally dies? what about ram??


thanks!
 
ElectricMan5 said:
I have a PowerBook G4 titanium with 800Mhz and 512mbs of ram, and my computer has recently been crashing. It starts to click, and the little swirly thing appears, then totally freezes and i have to force shutdown by holding the power button. Is my harddrive dying? i'm currently backing it up onto a 500gb external harddrive... would i be able to boot from this and use it if my harddrive totally dies? what about ram??


thanks!
Click to expand...

If you have superduper or carbon copy cloner (I prefer superduper) you can make a bootable copy to an external drive. Of course that assumes you can get a complete copy before the drive fails completely.

Cheers,
 
panzer06 said:
If you have superduper or carbon copy cloner (I prefer superduper) you can make a bootable copy to an external drive. Of course that assumes you can get a complete copy before the drive fails completely.

Cheers,
Click to expand...


Yeah, i have. It's still working and it still clicks, but it doesn't freeze up as much. It usually happened when i was on Safari... If my harddrive fails, how do i boot the computer from the firewire disk?
 
Titaniums are very easy to pop out the hard drive. You need to get a new hard drive fast.

One tip. Literally put ice on the bottom of the laptop or one of those blue ice packs when you transfer the info.

The heat is what kills the hard drive. Do it soon. if I were you, I wouldn't use it until you get a firewire enclosure and a new hard drive.

If you MUST use the laptop, do the ice thing (only on the bottom case, of course, you cannot get water in the laptop...) to keep it going until you can get your info off of there.
 
California said:
Titaniums are very easy to pop out the hard drive. You need to get a new hard drive fast.

One tip. Literally put ice on the bottom of the laptop or one of those blue ice packs when you transfer the info.

The heat is what kills the hard drive. Do it soon. if I were you, I wouldn't use it until you get a firewire enclosure and a new hard drive.

If you MUST use the laptop, do the ice thing (only on the bottom case, of course, you cannot get water in the laptop...) to keep it going until you can get your info off of there.
Click to expand...

how do i pop out the drive? and what's a firewire enclosure?
 
About the popping out of the HD: ifixit guide

A FireWire enclosure is basically a little box with a space for your HD and some chips to translate the IDE "language" that your drive speaks into Firewire "language" so you can treat it as an external disk and mount it on any computer that has firewire ports. You could get a USB enclosure, but your TiBook has USB1.1 and not 2.0, which is dog slow. 12Mbps full speed (about 1.25MB/s) compared to USB2's 480Mbps. The FW ports on your TiBook can reach 400Mbps max.

729504308_68d093eef1.jpg

That's how a typical FW enclosure looks like.
 
hard drive in 2.4 mb

my hd has had a head crash it was about 1.5 minutes long. Since it is not currently doing it apple will not replace the drive. does any one know how i can make the drive fail so it does not look like abuse so apple will give me a new one? It was just sitting on the table when it happened not being moved.
 
ok. since i have the western digital harddrive (500gb), should i just buy a ata 12 gb hardrive from ifixit and use the wd one for storage? do i need the firewire enclosure so it wouldn't over heat, or just to make it faster?
 
ElectricMan5 said:
ok. since i have the western digital harddrive (500gb), should i just buy a ata 12 gb hardrive from ifixit and use the wd one for storage? do i need the firewire enclosure so it wouldn't over heat, or just to make it faster?
Click to expand...

The FireWire hard drive is for a backup of your data, internal connections are much faster than external ones (such as USB or FireWire). I recommend something larger than 12 GB for your main hard drive... at least 80 GB nowadays.
 
Cloud Strife said:
500GB? Is that a SATA or IDE disk? Do you see just two connectors or a row of pins where the disk's connector should be? You need the enclosure to interface the disk with your laptop. If you get a SATA disk (2 connectors), you need a SATA -> FW enclosure and if IDE (row of pins), you need a IDE -> FW converter.
SATA connector
Click to expand...

I think we are talking about two different things here. He has an external 500GB drive he is using to backup the failing internal drive. While he could create a bootable partition on the 500GB drive without destroying the data (using a 3rd party utility) I think the potential for the loss of data is too great.

The firewire enclosure discussed here is to house his existing internal drive in the hope he could extract a full bootable clone. It would need to be IDE. SATA is not an option if the housing shall be a transit point for drives coming or going to the PB.

Cheers,
 
yeah sorry about that cloud strike... panzer was right. it's an external hd. I know that 12 GB isn't a lot, but my hardrive is extremely fast for me. i copied about 30 gb of content in an hour, which is better than my 3 days from my old computer for just a gig :). Would just using it the way i said it would work, though? and if i chill my current internal HD (like in the freezer) would i get more time out of it? thanks for your answers guys, i appreciate it.

Oh yea, btw i can't boot from the external, due to the bug with powerbooks. I have the Studio Edition, which is one of the bugged versions :(


oh, and another question: if i went to ifixit and bought that 12 gb hd, (ata) do i need a new FW Enclosure?
 
You could try, but I strongly recommend that you do not wait any longer and back up your data immediately. The disk is basically now a ticking time bomb waiting to explode and obliterate all your data when it "explodes" (dies).
 
Cloud Strife said:
You could try, but I strongly recommend that you do not wait any longer and back up your data immediately. The disk is basically now a ticking time bomb waiting to explode and obliterate all your data when it "explodes" (dies).
Click to expand...

yeah, i have don't worry. I cloned my computer using CCC onto it... It's bootable, but just not on PPC Macs. My parents have an intel though, in case i need my data. I'm now allowed to use it otherwise :(.

So I'm assuming that it would work... My computer hasn't done it at all yet, so it might've been temporary, but i don't wanna risk it. I assume that my HD is getting old, and that it should be replaced. But if the cause is the heat, how do i prevent it from heating up, so it doesn't happen again to the new HD?
 
You could get one of those laptop stands with built-in fans on the area where you put your laptop, so the laptop is cooled from the underside. Alternatively, as California said, you could put an ice pack on the bottom of the laptop right around the HD area.
 
ElectricMan5 said:
yeah, i have don't worry. I cloned my computer using CCC onto it... It's bootable, but just not on PPC Macs. My parents have an intel though, in case i need my data. I'm now allowed to use it otherwise :(.

So I'm assuming that it would work... My computer hasn't done it at all yet, so it might've been temporary, but i don't wanna risk it. I assume that my HD is getting old, and that it should be replaced. But if the cause is the heat, how do i prevent it from heating up, so it doesn't happen again to the new HD?
Click to expand...

Clones from PPC Macs will not boot on Intel Macs, however, the data will be available to the already powered on Intel mac.

You could buy a compatible, inexpensive FW drive and clone your system drive to it, using the option key to boot off the external or permanently select the external drive in system preferences, thereby working off the external drive all the time.

Cheers,
 
Cloud Strife said:
You could get one of those laptop stands with built-in fans on the area where you put your laptop, so the laptop is cooled from the underside. Alternatively, as California said, you could put an ice pack on the bottom of the laptop right around the HD area.
Click to expand...

k. the problem hasn't occurred at all yet, and it's actually running quite smoothly. I've been posting all of these from it. If i do get the 12 gb, would it be any slower than this one since it has less memory, faster, since it's newer, or exactly the same but with less memory? and how do i know if it's IDE or SATA? or is it just the default one? it says it works with all powerbook G4's... here are the details:

12 GB 9.5mm ATA Hard Drive

Dimensions:
2.5" wide x 9.5mm tall

Capacity:
12 GB

Speed:
4200 RPM
 
ElectricMan5 said:
k. the problem hasn't occurred at all yet, and it's actually running quite smoothly. I've been posting all of these from it. If i do get the 12 gb, would it be any slower than this one since it has less memory, faster, since it's newer, or exactly the same but with less memory? and how do i know if it's IDE or SATA? or is it just the default one? it says it works with all powerbook G4's... here are the details:

12 GB 9.5mm ATA Hard Drive

Dimensions:
2.5" wide x 9.5mm tall

Capacity:
12 GB

Speed:
4200 RPM
Click to expand...

That is a very slow old drive.

You could get on of these new for $60 or post a WTB ad in the marketplace for a 30, 40 or 60GB IDE drive pulled from an old PB. I'm sure someone would respond with a less expensive option if cost is an issue.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145174
 
panzer06 said:
That is a very slow old drive.

You could get on of these new for $60 or post a WTB ad in the marketplace for a 30, 40 or 60GB IDE drive pulled from an old PB. I'm sure someone would respond with a less expensive option if cost is an issue.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145174
Click to expand...

how do i find the current rpm of my HD? it's a pretty old computer. I had to do the hack for leopard to run on it... 4200 rpm might be fine. where do i find the rpm of my current internal HD?
 
ElectricMan5 said:
how do i find the current rpm of my HD? it's a pretty old computer. I had to do the hack for leopard to run on it... 4200 rpm might be fine. where do i find the rpm of my current internal HD?
Click to expand...

If you click on "about this mac" and look at ata, the exact hard drive model number should be displayed. You can then google the model number for the exact specs.

Cheers,
 
panzer06 said:
If you click on "about this mac" and look at ata, the exact hard drive model number should be displayed. You can then google the model number for the exact specs.

Cheers,
Click to expand...

yep, it's the 4200 RPM HD :). If i get the 12 gb it would probably be way faster, since my current one is about 6 years old. It only has about 100 mb a second, when the external one can go 800 a second lol.
 
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