Powerbook won't boot!

[Nspace]

I was working in InDesign today and all the sudden things started going crazy slow, lots of of the spinning beach-ball for long time and I couldn't really do anything, save or close InDesign or anything. So I held down the power-button to shut down the powerbook and then rebooted. It then stopped on the gray screen with the apple on it fir a long time. It kept doing this.

So I searched up some solutions and I have done the following:

Reset PMU
Zapped PRAM
Went into single-user mode and ran fsck (found a couple problems and modified the file system, ran it again and it said everything was good)

My Tiger disc is not with me, realized I left it back at my parents house and I only have access to my Panther disc.

I used that to run the Hardware Tester, and it found no problems there either.

I want to repair disk permissions but I'm not sure its wise to run that from the Panther disc since I have Tiger installed.

It still won't boot up. A couple times I was able to get it to a cursor on a blue background but after that I stop hearing the hard drive working.

Is there anything else I should try? If I can get my hands on a Tiger disc from a friend is there anything else I can use on that disc to help get me back up and running?

Also booting into safe mode dosnt work, I followed the instructions but nothing seems to happen.

Thanks, Tom

 

[mad jew]

So you can boot from the optical drive then? Do you have extra RAM? If you do, take it out to check for a bad RAM chip.

 

[munkees]

I was working in InDesign today and all the sudden things started going crazy slow, lots of of the spinning beach-ball for long time and I couldn't really do anything, save or close InDesign or anything. So I held down the power-button to shut down the powerbook and then rebooted. It then stopped on the gray screen with the apple on it fir a long time. It kept doing this.

So I searched up some solutions and I have done the following:

Reset PMU
Zapped PRAM
Went into single-user mode and ran fsck (found a couple problems and modified the file system, ran it again and it said everything was good)

My Tiger disc is not with me, realized I left it back at my parents house and I only have access to my Panther disc.

I used that to run the Hardware Tester, and it found no problems there either.

I want to repair disk permissions but I'm not sure its wise to run that from the Panther disc since I have Tiger installed.

It still won't boot up. A couple times I was able to get it to a cursor on a blue background but after that I stop hearing the hard drive working.

Is there anything else I should try? If I can get my hands on a Tiger disc from a friend is there anything else I can use on that disc to help get me back up and running?

Also booting into safe mode dosnt work, I followed the instructions but nothing seems to happen.

Thanks, Tom

Hope you have applecare, This happened to me, and I ended up with a new HD, MLB (main logic baord) and thermsat, on a 1.5 Ghz 15" PowerBook.

When you get the tiger CD you shall see the HD, and it problably report in the S.M.A.R.T. fail or failling.

It took my HD 2 weeks to die completly

Good luck

 

[Nspace]

Thanks for the replies.

I got a Tiger disk off of my friend so that I could run Disk Utility. I repaired the permissions and that went fine. The SMART status said verfied.

As I mentioned earlier I ran that Apple Hardware Test and it discovered no memory errors. Unfortunately I do not have a spare stick of RAM around for testing.

I can boot from the optical drive fine, it just won't boot off of the hd into osx.

I can imagine going through the installation process is not a good idea, since there is some data that I need, and it would cause problems since I have updated 10.4 with updates? Or can I use the Archive and Install feature and try to get back up and running that way (will that delete any of my files?)

Arghh I really hope this isn't a hardware program, I could totally part with all the gb of data on there if I could just get about 2 mb of files off of it.

Any other ideas?

Also: If I was to buy a laptop hard-drive enclosure, in the event the hard drive was starting to die, is there a possibility I could take the drive out and backup the files on another system?

 

[Nspace]

Well I went ahead after reading up on the Archive and Install, and it has been stuck at Verifying Destination Volume for like 20 minutes now, I imagine the predictions about the hard drive about to go being correct.

Looks like I will have to guy buy a new one and replace it myself since I do not have Apple care, I hope there is a way I could recover some of my data before anything happens?

 

[Togglehead]

you could try the external enclosure idea.....if its anything like a PC....you can slave the drive (if you can get it to read) and get data off of it.

...before you do that though.....put the drive in the freezer for 20 minutes.....take it out, and try to get data off of it......trust me.

 

[Nspace]

Looks like I will have to do that. I hope it can hold up for like 5 minutes, its not making any unusual sounds or grinding or clicking, just normal hard drive sounds. I hope thats a good sign that I have a little bit of life left in it.

I had to put a part in the freezer before, but just out of curiosity, may I ask why lol?

Also is there any way I can actually guarantee that its a hard drive problem without buying a new drive to try it out?

 

[dr_lha]

The SMART status said verfied.

SMART is fecking useless IMHO. The HD on my PB died a couple of days ago, the computer started sounding like a wheezing hobo, and then finally wouldn't boot up.

I took the machine apart, verified that the wheezing noise was indeed coming from the HD, and took it out and gave it a swift bang on the desk. This made the HD able to boot up, although it took 30 minutes of wheezing and grinding, and the computer would periodically lock up as it stumbled its way over many bad blocks and general crapness.

Anyway - the point is, after getting the thing to a point where I could run System Profiler, I looked at the SMART status, and guess what: "Verified".

About 30 mins later the HD died for good.

 

[Nspace]

I guess there is really no way to be sure. But the fact that the Tiger install basically sat for 30 minutes on Disk Verification for over 20 minutes, I can assume thats where the problem lies.

Also when I run fsck, on a good drive does that normally run pretty fast? When I ran it, it took like 20 minutes to go through all the steps, not sure if this is normal, if not, this is another factor pointing at the hard drive.

Sounds like my best bet is to leave this thing off until I get a hard drive enclosure and put in a new hard drive?

 

[mad jew]

SMART is fecking useless IMHO.

It's the same as all those software-based checks. Even the Apple Hardware Test misses most problems. However, there's the off chance it may pick up on something which is why they're not completely useless IMO. They just shouldn't be relied upon.

Nspace, if you have another Mac you can connect to it with a Firewire cable and use Target Disk Mode to hopefully get your data off.

 

[dr_lha]

It's the same as all those software-based checks. Even the Apple Hardware Test misses most problems. However, there's the off chance it may pick up on something which is why they're not completely useless IMO. They just shouldn't be relied upon.

Indeed. However my experience of having about 5 HDs go wrong (in a large shop of computers) non of them gave any indication through SMART that anything was wrong! I have yet to see that mythical case where SMART actually does any good.

 

[Nspace]

It was indeed the hard-drive. Put in a new Fujitsu 80 gb, and installed Tiger, its working fine now. *glad it wasnt the logic board or something else*

Unfortunately data recovery was pretty much useless with the external enclosure idea, it would lock up finder, and even with macdrive on my pc, it would lock up explorer. I did manage to get a couple smaller files I needed (like the 8 pages of notes for a test on Tuesday) so I guess it helped a little. Tried the freezer thing after and that didn't do anything.

Thanks for the help everyone.