How to tell if hard drive causes kernel panicss

[floyde]

I gave my sister my old Powerbook G4 and it had been working well for her needs until about a few weeks ago. She started getting random kernel panics until OS X would no longer boot.

I thought it was the hard drive and ran disk utility from the Leopard dvd. Disk utility found errors on the disk but couldn't fix them, so I used disk warrior and got the disk working again. After that, I formatted the disk and reinstalled Leopard.

It was working fine at first, but then the kernel panics began again. What confuses me now is that disk warrior no longer finds any issues with the disk, but still the kernel panics occur on a clean install. I want to replace the hard drive so that my sister doesn't have to buy another computer, but I'm no longer sure that the hard drive is the only issue with the machine.

Is there a way of to verify that the disk is damaged and that the rest of the hardware is ok? Thanks

 

[McGiord]

Run the Apple hardware test. Using the disc that originally came with the Mac.
Check in the Console Log what are those kernel panics about?
Kernel Panics might also be caused by faulty RAM, after you check the cobsole and once you run the hardware test you might know better.

 

[floyde]

Thanks! I will try that.