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rickvanr

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Apr 10, 2002
3,259
13
Brockville
Hello

I have a B&W G3/400. It is a Rev A of the B&W G3s and I've read they have some problems with ATA hard drives. I also have a SCSI PCI card, with a 9GB SCSI hard drive attacked too. I left the B&W on for the weekend when I went home to my parents. I can back, and the screen was blue. So I restarted, and it booted up of my 9GB SCSI drive which has OS9 installed on it. I was not too worried because I don't use the B&W for much yet. After playing Lemmings on the B&W for a while under OS9, I restarted, the first few times it said there was an unknown volume, would I like to initialize it? I didn't, hoping with a few more restarts it may work again. Next restart it made some awful sounds, clinky and clanging, and didn't recognize the drive in drive setup, then one restart and it was there, like nothing happened, I switched start up disks and nothing, didn't start up. So I zapped the PRAM, and it boots in OSX, I was sitting on the couch, watching TV, when it put on the screensaver and then all of a sudden it started making those horrible noises again, and I woke it up, but everything was frozen. So I restart again, and the ATA drive is gone again.

My question is, is this more likely a bad hard drive, or simply the ATA bus is bad? Because it has worked after the strange noises with no data loss. I'm just stumped, any insight would be wonderful.

Thanks
 
The drive is dead.

Those horrible sounds are the internals of the drive falling to bits.

:(
 
So she's in her last days basically? some are good, most are bad, until she'll eventually die for good? Is that the jist of it?
 
rickvanr said:
...until she'll eventually die for good? Is that the jist of it?

Accept it. Everything dies for good. You and me too... and your hard-drive.

I've read elsewhere that the average life of an HD is 5 years...

Seriously, if you can get one more boot from it and back-up the data then consider yourself lucky.
 
Sounds like you majorly trashed the hard drive. Don't be surprised if the drive ends up being a write-off.
 
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