This is just plain weird

[Samwise592]

Alright, my boss has a problem with his G4 mac mini, and naturally since im mr. tech support among all my friends (and co-workers) he brought this thing to me.

He's been getting kernel panics when he starts up (2 seconds after apple logo appears)

i booted it into target disk mode and plugged in firewire to my macbook.... and I got a kernel panic.

i got it into the open firmware mode, but as far as i can tell there is no way to reformat from there

Booting with Disk Warrior kernel panics it

Single user mode panics it... so i cant run fcsk

zapping the P-Ram doesn't do anything

im 99% sure its the HDD and not the ram, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Makosuke]

I've seen stone-dead drives, and I've seen drives corrupted and largely unreadable, but I've yet to see one that just crashes anything it touches.

If it's screwed up enough to panic a computer connected to it in target disk mode, I'm not sure what option you have but to crack it open and replace the drive. You'd think that putting it in an external case would just do the same--panic whatever it was attached to--unless it's the cable or controller on the mini, not the drive itself. If you've got a 2.5" case and are comfortable opening it up, might be worth a crack.

Do you have Boot Camp installed on your MB or access to a Windows machine with a firewire port? If so, you could try target disk mode with Windows and see if Windows chokes too.

Alternately, you could try booting your computer from DiskWarrior, then mounting it via target disk mode, but I expect you'll just get another panic.

For what it's worth, if you do manage to get something to read it and salvage data, it's probably still a good idea to chuck the drive unless it turns out the Mini itself is bad--if it's that toast, even if it claims to check out ok and reformat, it's probably a cute little time bomb.

 

[Makosuke]

Come to think of it, there's one other thing you might try; I can't remember if the optical drive and hard drive are master and slave on a G4 mini, but if so, it could theoretically be the optical drive screwing up the IDE bus and causing the panics.

Probably not, but might be worth a shot with the optical drive disconnected if you open it up.