what happened to my mac?

[Marlon_JBT]

Hey, Me too!

This sucks! I'm going through the same thing as you krossfyter!

My PB takes an hour or two, or an entire morning to boot (no kidding), the hard drive clicks (one click about every second, then after maybe... 7 clicks, there's a pause, then it starts again), Safari takes 20 minutes to start, some programs just freeze the entire laptop, rendering it unusuable completely. Don't let the hard drive just STOP reading and writing, then I have to reboot... which is guaranteed to take hours. When it boots to the UNIX login screen, that extends it about another hour or two, because I have to log out, then log in again. I also seem to have another problem, extreme overheating (I know that I have a 12" PB Rev. 1, but this is much worse), and my fan comes on almost all of the time. Keep in mind that all I do with the PB now is surf, and IM, if I can do that. This has taken much of my battery life away.

I went from weeks of uptime, to a reboot about every two days. I've got a backup from 10-29-03, and if I have done anything with the PowerBook since then, it is either on my other computer, or my USB flash drive, so I'm not worried about my information. Honestly, I've got my entire home folder on another hard drive in another machine.

Apple wants $50! Now, I ask, could I take this thing to an Apple Store, for them to fix it? The $50 is a charge to talk to Tech Support. I don't want to talk to tech support, I JUST WANT IT FIXED!

This is quite frustrating, and I've been dealing with it for a month now, but.......... I still love my PowerBook for some strange reason....

 

[krossfyter]

try backing up your mac then doing a clean install of osx. erase and install that is.... see if that helps any.

 

[Horrortaxi]

Back up, if you can, but I don't think reformatting and resintalling the OS will do any good. This sounds like a dying drive--it might not even work reliably enough to finish installing the OS.

If your computer is under a year old it's still under warranty. You could also still buy AppleCare to extend the coverage. The only tricky thing might be convincing Apple over the phone that your drive is hosed. Now that I think about it, maybe you should try reinstalling the OS--along with all the language packs, printer drivers, developer tools, X11--finish off that drive once and for all.

 

[Marlon_JBT]

I have reinstalled OS X twice. Both times, of course, was a LONG process for something I'm sure only takes a little more than a hour, or less. I've repaired permissions, ran the hardware test, which stopped at the hard drive, the error I cannot recall.

I used the Command+ V trick to view the UNIX start up messages. Of course, everything is slow, but during the disk check, I get volume errors, which say "Volume is 869650 Volume should be 869640" or something along those lines. When the applications start to load, like the Apache Web Server, it usually does this...

Waiting for Apache web server
Waiting for Apache web server

and so on and so on, for each application. A long and lengthy process. I wish it would die now, but it's going through a long and slow death.