Is my hard drive about to kick the bucket? (G5)

[TheBMill]

Hello,

I bought a Power PC G5 dual 2.5ghz machine back when it came out a few years ago. Recently I was getting a lot of errors, then finally it would just freeze up and..I'd get a black screen that said "darwin" and I was unable to login to the operating system.

I assumed that it was because I used a freeware program that deleted files to "clean up" my hard drive and that this program accidentally deleted files I needed.

So, I reformatted the drive and did a reinstall of the OSX. (the latest one) And while the computer seems to run faster, I still get weird errors. Both safari and firefox quit unexpectedly. And sometimes when I go to install a program, the install won't work.

For example, I just got Ilife '08 and it gave me a message afterwards saying, "Installation was not successful". And as of now, I can't get it to install.

What should I do? Is there a program that would help? (Disk warrior? Disc utility?) Is my hard drive slowly dying and I need to get a new one? If so, any you'd guys recommend? (IE. I have this drive as my second video editing drive, perhaps I should just buy another one of them? http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Internal-Drive-Cache-ST3300622AS-RK/dp/B000FBYMU8)

Thanks,
Bobby

 

[TheBMill]

re:

Also of note: I also just put in 2 1gb sticks of memory...could that have something to do with it?

There's 4 sticks of 512 and 2 of the new 1gb....different brands too...

In terms of the disk...

Diskwarrior says this:

"• Errors, if any, in the directory structure such as tree depth, header node, map nodes, node size, node counts, node
links, indexes and more have been repaired.
• 50 files had a directory entry with an incorrect alias flag that was repaired.
• 6 files had a directory entry with an incorrect text encoding value that was repaired.
• 1 folder had a directory entry with an incorrect custom icon flag that was repaired.
• Incorrect values in the Volume Information were repaired.
Disk Information:
Files: 323,916
Folders: 78,988
Free Space: 197.85 GB
Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Block Size: 4 K
Disk Sectors: 489,972,534
Media: Maxtor 6Y250M0
Time: 8/17/07 10:32:37 AM
DiskWarrior Version: 4.0"

 

[CaptainCanuck]

What's the S.M.A.R.T status of the drive? If it's "verified" then it should be alright. If not, then there's a good chance the drive may be failing.

You might also want to try to repair the drive a couple more times using diskwarrior or Disk Utility just to make sure everything checks out.

 

[TheBMill]

interesting. I just took out the new memory sticks and it seems to be installing now...ill see if i get any more of those old errors....if not, looks like ill be making a return here...

thanks so much

 

[KD7IWP]

RAM could do that. Let us know what happens.

 

[TheBMill]

Well. It definitely was the memory cards. They were 1gb sticks from "G.Skill" Yeah. Never heard of em'. I guess there's a reason why.

Was thinking of replacing them with crucial brand sticks. But, I'm wondering if my old G5 is having trouble with a stick that large, as the rest are all 512gb? Then again, I have no reason why it shouldn't accept 1gb cards. I'm guessing it's really just the whacky brand I got...