Question about PowerBook G4 12 possible hard drive issue

[ferianriel]

Hello everyone.
I have a PowerBook G4 12 that I own for a long time, not using it much as it is under Mac OS X Tiger and Linux Mintppc under an obsolete version, so I use other hardware for my daily uses.



From the beginning of this year, I started to notice that every time I logged in, everything became slower and slower, booting and loading, except the mouse. Booting became increasingly slower, while opening an application like iTunes took minutes with the rainbow wheel appearing and everything else completely frozen.



Eventually it couldn't boot (I could still power on but the screen stay black) so I thought the existing memory card didn't work anymore so I purchased a new memory card of 1GB after verifying its compatibility with my PowerBook G4 12 and inserted it into the memory slot.



At first, it didn't work so I had to reset the pram (holding down cmd-option-P-R at power). Finally my PowerBook was able to load and displayed the Mac OS X gray loading screen. Then I heard some weird suspicious noises and as the gray screen didn’t change so alarmed, I quickly turned the PoweBook off with the power button. I’m now afraid to turn it on, as I fear it might damage the HD further.



I just find the timing a bit suspicious that my hard drive fail just at the moment of changing the memory card. Is there a way to confirm that the HDD is broken?

 

[B S Magnet]

Then I heard some weird suspicious noises and as the gray screen didn’t change so alarmed,

Everything you described, but especially this passage above, are the hallmarks of a failing HDD.

The weird, suspicious noises were, I’m guessing, mechanical in nature (i.e., motion-related, clicking, clunking, whirring, and/or repetitive) and not merely beeps,, electrical buzzes, or other solid-state sounds.

As old hard drives get to the end of their lives, they can exhibit the signs of slowing down — often, what’s happening is at the low-level of the drive itself, the read/write heads are coming across new, bad blocks it has to “mark out” as being no-go spots on the drive.

A drive maintenance utility like DiskWarrior or Disk Doctor is able to examine the condition of every block and to provide a report on the state of things — most importantly, whether the drive is well on its way to failure and needs to be replaced immediately.

In your situation, it’s entirely possible that the drive has reached that point of no-return. At this point, in some, limited situations, in hopes of data retrieval, one may be able to take out the HDD and put it in the freezer for, say, a day (to assure that the entire drive contents — the metals, magnetic coatings, etc — are at the same temperature), then to immediately connect it to perform an immediate transfer to a new drive source (as this is likely to be the last time, if at all, that data can be retrieved from the platters).

In my experience, I’ve managed to sometimes retrieve some of the data using something like Carbon Copy Cloner (or SuperDuper), but in the time available before the drive warms back up, I’ve never been able to retrieve all of the data. Maybe sandwiching it in between some cold packs might prolong the freezer conditions, but one would also need to be mindful of condensation shorting out the board.

In short: I don’t have a lot of good news relating to the personal contents you have on your PowerBook HDD. If you tried the above freezing strategy and used CCC or SD to focus only on, say, your user directory /Users/[yourloginname], and to move that to another source (via, say, a FireWire connection or, more likely, a PATA-to-USB adapter one can get online), you miiiiight be able to salvage that data in time.

There is an upside: there are PATA-to-mSATA and PATA-to-m.2-SATA adapters you can get for cheap online to set up a low cost, solid-state drive (these days, of comparable or greater capacity than the dying HDD in there) as a replacement for your PowerBook. Not only will this restore usability for your laptop, but it will also be noticeably faster than all the years when your HDD was working fine. It will also likely be the last time you’ll ever need to change the drive in the PowerBook as, generally, they tend to last longer (especially for these vintage applications).

This SSD upgrade, should you consider it, is what many folks here do with their vintage gear to keep them running through present day. The most noticeable thing about using SSD is, even though the specs of an SSD will never be maxed out on these older Macs (that PATA bus is much slower than the SSD’s limits), things like launching applications will be perceptibly much faster.

Let us know, and good luck.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Well, I'd work in reverse. I'd remove the new ram stick and see if normal function returns. If it does, you're good and I'd try to get a replacement as the stick is probably bad. If not, I would could connect the powerbook to another firewire mac, boot into Target disk mode and use disk utility of the functioning host mac to check the suspect hdd on the 12" powerbook target mac which will show up on the host mac as a simple external hard drive. If it reads with errors, try and repair through Disk Utility. If it fails to boot after that, replace the hard drive with another. I recommend a SSD solution like an msata + ide enclosure.

 

[m1maverick]

I second the diagnosis and suggestions provided by BS Magnet. The hard disk is the most likely issue.

 

[Wouter3]

I think your harddrive might be gone, but there is nothing wrong in the approach that Certificate of Excellence is proposing. Or use a startup disc in your DVD drive to start diagnosing the HD.

 

[B S Magnet]

I think your harddrive might be gone, but there is nothing wrong in the approach that Certificate of Excellence is proposing. Or use a startup disc in your DVD drive to start diagnosing the HD.

In the end, if operating with the risk reduction that this is a failing HDD, it would be prudent to minimize any testing activity which doesn’t involve the actual moving of data (i.e., the salvage) to another storage location.

For this reason, given what’s at stake, futzing with RAM is something I’d worry about after getting the data mirrored to a more stable, reliable location.