Help: Hard Drive Not Responding Normally

[StarbucksSam]

I sold my iMac G4 to a member of this site knowing of only a FireWire defect. Now, after wiping the drive for him before shipping, he is having issues installing the OS. He is given an error at the end. He has tried multiple times to reformat the disk and he has even tried using disk warrior. The drive is THERE... and showing up in disk utility... but nothing is really WORKING.

What can we do?

For reference:

iMac G4/800 15" 768 60 Superdrive Rev. A

 

[t300]

I'm the member with the iMac and it is odd. It seems to be failing the installation at the 4 minute mark at 55% of "Additional Essientials." When I go into Disc Utility and try to repair disk I get "Repairing disk failed with error Could not unmount disk." Anyone have any ideas?

 

[PlaceofDis]

open up disk utility and check the disk's S.M.A.R.T. status to see if it is failing, any noises btw?

 

[StarbucksSam]

open up disk utility and check the disk's S.M.A.R.T. status to see if it is failing, any noises btw?

He's looking in to that. For the record, Tech Tool said it failed the 2 HD tests but the repair did not work.

 

[t300]

open up disk utility and check the disk's S.M.A.R.T. status to see if it is failing, any noises btw?

The S.M.A.R.T. status is VERIFIED and there are no noises. I am so perplexed.

 

[Rocksaurus]

Interestingly I had a problem like this when I was trying to install Panther on an old BW G3... What it turned out to be was some junk on the Panther install cd. Make sure your CD(s)/DVD is clean. With the drive status verified, and the installation stopping at a particular point, I figured I'd throw this out there.

 

[PlaceofDis]

is there an apple test cd around to use? that might shed some more light on the situation. very odd indeed, if possible try different installation discs, there could be something wrong with them instead.... along the disc route if you can get a cd lens cleaner in there to make sure that the disc drive is reading everything okay that might be worth a try as well

 

[t300]

Okay....Long story short. I seemed to fix everything hard drive wise. Disk Utility doesn't give me crap, etc. I installed Tiger and it installs fine....but...then it tells me it's going to be restart. It restarts and then I hang on the grey Apple screen. It does nothing...What could this mean?

 

[StarbucksSam]

Okay....Long story short. I seemed to fix everything hard drive wise. Disk Utility doesn't give me crap, etc. I installed Tiger and it installs fine....but...then it tells me it's going to be restart. It restarts and then I hang on the grey Apple screen. It does nothing...What could this mean?

I'm not sure how you did that but I'm glad. From that point... well... I don't know. It sounds to me like there is something wrong with your Tiger CD OR you can't simply install Tiger on to that computer without having a lower OS having been present before. I'll be home in a little bit and we'll talk about this. I'm glad the drive is not fried.

 

[Crikey]

I've heard a number of reports of Tiger install DVDs that didn't work, or worked once or twice and then wouldn't work any more. Early in the Tiger install process, you are given an option to perform a "media check". This you should certainly do before proceeding with the installation. If you know anyone else with install media, try using that instead of yours and see what happens.

Hmm, you might also boot using the install CD and check how much RAM the system is reporting. I once had similar symptoms installing Panther on a couple Pismos because a firmware update had told the Pismo that some third-party RAM upgrades weren't good. I downloaded a utility for telling the system that the RAM was after all good, and was then able to successfully upgrade and run the notebooks with the full RAM complement. They have run reliably since.

Good luck,

Crikey