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PB HD issues

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BigAlMAC

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 26, 2004
18
0
Good day...
As a laptop I have a PowerBook G4 12" 1.33. It has served me very well as being quite portable etc. However lately it has been really really slow. Even not starting up at times, or even going to the finder I get the spinning ball which does not go away. I get the ball quite often & finally have to shutdown.

Nothing has been added or installed. I often just get to the login screen & it hangs. Once I got a white screen saying unable to boot please type mac-boot & enter.... nothing happened.

Is it time to replace the HD? If so what would people recommend. This is not my main work horse anymore but I still would like to keep it going.

Any info very much appreciated..
Al
 
If you have your original restore disc, put that in the drive, boot the system and hold the Option key. This will allow you to see the options of bootable partitions. The restore disc should have Apple's Diagnostic Tools on it where you can test several parts of your PB. It will give you an idea of the status of your hard drive. You can also boot off the restore disc the regular way (booting and holding the C key) and verify the disk in Disk Utility.

I'm currently in the same boat. I feel my drive is failing. I was having the same problems (minus the boot issue) and already tried formatting the drive twice within the past week. Disk Utility both times said the hard drive failed verification, but it passed Apple's Diagnostic Tools. I feel its only a matter of time before the drive completely fails in PowerBook.
 
Thanks for the info..
I put my disc in yesterday & used Disk Utility & clicked on the HD & it came up as Failing.
I do have a DMG of the drive from about a week ago so im not too heart broken. I ordered a new drive yesterday & it should arrive to day for me to replace.
It seems the life of the drive is about 3-4ish years.

Best of luck... keep us posted...

Al
 
The best advice I can give you is to head over to ifixit.com and follow the disassembly guide. There's about 20 screws of different heads and sizes holding the uppercase on the system. If you can get through it everything else should be easy.

Also, can I ask what drive you purchased?
 
Thats exactly where I got the instructions to do this little operation.

The drive is an ATA Ultra100, I picked up a Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB 5400RPM ATA100 8MB 12.5MS 2.5IN Hard Drive 3 Year MFR Warranty

al
 
Got the drive late yesterday.
Installed it without a problem. Reinstalled Mac OS, used CCC through my MacPro, started the PBG4 in FW mode & mounted my disc image I made a few weeks ago. I restored the image to the PB & seems fine. Just using Software Update to finally update the PB (wouldn't do it before).

(I wonder if I could have done this with the new MacBooks being no FW)

Al
 
I experienced similar problems with my 1.33 Ghz PowerBook G4 (15") last year. Then one day the HD failed altogether. I brought it to a place that did forensics hard drive recovery and found out even they - who did work for the FBI - couldn't help. Swapping that bad boy now and springing for a professional install from, say, Geek Squad is money well spent. Just my .02
 
BigAlMAC said:
Got the drive late yesterday.
Installed it without a problem. Reinstalled Mac OS, used CCC through my MacPro, started the PBG4 in FW mode & mounted my disc image I made a few weeks ago. I restored the image to the PB & seems fine. Just using Software Update to finally update the PB (wouldn't do it before).

(I wonder if I could have done this with the new MacBooks being no FW)

Al
Click to expand...

I think you can boot from USB for the intel macs... not that it's a good thing...

And this thread is a perfect example of how to do it. Nice work Sir.
 
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