weird boot disk behavior

[1042686]

I noticed this morning that my QSG4 was booting reeeaaaaaaally slowly. I ran DU and it told me the IDE bootdisk had errors and needed to be repaired. I pulled it out and quickly connected it up to another mac via external enclosure and ran DU and it says that the drive is fine and doesn't need to be repaired (did this twice actually). I repaired it anyway and put it back into my QSG4 and it is booting up fine.

Any ideas as to what happened? What stopped working and then miraculously fixed itself? Weird. Anyhow, I feel like I really need to replace the drive now. I have a bunch of sata drives sitting around (4 at the moment actually, 160, 500, 78 & 78 to be exact). I was thinking the 78's in a raid would be really cool.

I really need to find a mac-happy sata1 PCI card which is not an easy task anymore lol

 

[eyoungren]

Disk Utility is more hit and miss than anything. I would, if you can, get a copy of DiskWarrior. DW can handle a lot of stuff DU cannot. And it can save your data as well from a malfunctioning hard drive.

 

[1042686]

Disk Utility is more hit and miss than anything. I would, if you can, get a copy of DiskWarrior. DW can handle a lot of stuff DU cannot. And it can save your data as well from a malfunctioning hard drive.

Never used Diskwarrior but I will hunt around for a copy. Is it PPC only or did they move onto Intel based macs? If that's the case, do you know the latest version for PPC? I think either way I will CCclone onto one of the sata drives so I have a bootable image back up in the event of catastrophic failure. Maybe until I can source a sata1 pci card, I'll grab a couple of those sata to ide converters off of newegg or ebay.

The box is booting up fine now acting happy as a clam - quite zippy for ide. The weirdness was when I disconnected the QSG4 from the ADC monitor to hook up a dual2ghz PMG5 to work on. When I plugged everything back up, the sluggish boot/drive error started. I wonder if I static zapped it accidently handling the cabs n case. Id think its highly unlikely though as my desk is metal so any static I'd think would be discharged the second I touched it. Anyhow, the fun never ends

 

[eyoungren]

Never used Diskwarrior but I will hunt around for a copy. Is it PPC only or did they move onto Intel based macs? If that's the case, do you know the latest version for PPC? I think either way I will CCclone onto one of the sata drives so I have a bootable image back up in the event of catastrophic failure. Maybe until I can source a sata1 pci card, I'll grab a couple of those sata to ide converters off of newegg or ebay.

The box is booting up fine now acting happy as a clam. The weirdness was when I disconnected the QSG4 from the ADC monitor to hook up a dual2ghz PMG5 to work on. When I plugged everything back up, the sluggish boot/drive error started. The fun never ends

DiskWarrior is made by Alsoft. Currently it's on version 5.0 and it's universal. There's also a version for OS9.

However, version 4.4 is the last version available that will boot on optical media. Version 5 comes on a USB stick.

 

[havokalien]

How is the battery on the motherboard? low battery can cause boot issues in macs. Its good or it should be pulled type of deal.

Repairing permissions also fixes odd hard drive issues.

 

[for this]

I think it might be a bad sector. The drive can fix it automatically by marking the area as unusable after failing to write onto that sector.

 

[jbarley]

Never used Diskwarrior but I will hunt around for a copy. Is it PPC only or did they move onto Intel based macs?

As mentioned DiskWarrior is universal, it's also $120 but well worth it. I purchased DW many years ago when I first switched over to Apple, it has saved my A$$ many times over the years.

 

[0248294]

If you're going SATA, get a Mac-specific card. Quicksilvers are extremely picky. A flashed SIL card might or might not work. For some it does, but for some not. For me, it didn't. I spent an hour trying to figuring out why my card wasn't flashed since my QS refused to boot, only to find out it worked just fine on my MDD.

 

[1042686]

I settled on a IOCrest SATAx4 PCI card after a recommendation from a gent who had this card installed in his QS and was booting from it. I would've preferred a sonnet for example but I couldn't find one for sale lol. Anyhow, we'll see if it works when it gets here.

 

[eyoungren]

I settled on a IOCrest SATAx4 PCI card after a recommendation from a gent who had this card installed in his QS and was booting from it. I would've preferred a sonnet for example but I couldn't find one for sale lol. Anyhow, we'll see if it works when it gets here.

Just a note from those of us who use SATA cards…

Give the Mac a few extra moments to find the boot drive when booting. It's hardwired to scan the bus for IDE devices first, then optical media and only then to look elsewhere. That takes a bit longer than you may be used to and is not an indicator that things aren't functioning correctly.

Once you start booting though, it's fast.

 

[1042686]

Just a note from those of us who use SATA cards…

Give the Mac a few extra moments to find the boot drive when booting. It's hardwired to scan the bus for IDE devices first, then optical media and only then to look elsewhere. That takes a bit longer than you may be used to and is not an indicator that things aren't functioning correctly.

Once you start booting though, it's fast.

Awesome. Will do. Thanks

I replaced the old pram battery with a new one a month or so ago so I know that was not it. The bad sector sounds possible - I mean this drive could very easily be 10+ years old. I don't remember its age exactly. When the sata controller comes in, I'll clone one of my sata drives and boot from that. Ultimately, when I run across a good SSD deal, I'll grab a couple of those - one for this QS and one for my new to me ppcG5.

 

[1042686]

I'm a little bugged as the card I bought was clearly marketed as a sata1 PCI card (triple checked their add verbiage), but the card the seller sent was a sata2 PCI-X card that is backwards compatible. I did try it for s**ts n' giggles but the QSG4 wouldn't even boot.

Anyhow, I think I'm going to put it in my PMG5 as my model has 2 PCIX. This will let me put in a SATA light scribe drive I have to replace the noisy superdrive (I hope I have a sata cable long enough) and then I'll find some places to tuck in some extra HDDs as the card has x4 internal SATA2 ports. So my QS friendly sata controller card search continues.