[MAC365]

hi. im a bit worried as i think my hard drive is failing, but im not sure what i should do. just wondering what others thought.

what happened was, i was listening to music on itunes yesterday, and it suddenly stopped playing. i looked at the dock, and itunes had quit, so i clicked the app but it wouldnt launch, and no other app would start either. so i restarted the ibook. however, it just showed a blinking question mark icon - no startup disk!

argggg.

and on starting from the cd, i couldnt even find my startup disk in disk utility to check its status or repair it. so i naturally thought my hard drive was dead and i had lost my data. i powered off the ibook.

but this is when it gets really weird. when i started again from the power button, just to check it really was dead, the ibook started normally and has run normally for a few hours - no glitches or noises from the drive or any sign of impending doom. its SMART status is also 'verified' and no problems were reported on a verification of disk run.

i only fitted a replacement drive under a year ago. i right game that was, so im a bit disappointed this one might me on its last legs as well.

but that showed very obvious, and increasingly bad signs of failure for weeks before it finally gave up. this one has been absolutely fine up till now

im hoping its just some sort of software glitch, or even a very rare hardware issue that might never happen again. what do you think?

btw, this is on an ibook 1ghz, running 10.4.11. cheers

[Big Mac]

I'm sorry to say that your hopes are unrealistic. A maor problem like this is not a small, rare glitch, and it will happen again. Make sure you have a backup of that drive and prepare to replace it.

[MAC365]

thanks for the warning, ive taken your advice; backed up what stuff i have, so i can use the laptop with impunity until it dies.

i'll post an update if the HD eventually fails. it has been fine since the problem although its most likely early stages of failure that will accelerate. my last hd also took a long time to die, although the symptoms were far more obvious from the start - some kind of bearing failure as it made a weird noise when the ibook was tilted.

[Eug]

You can replace the iBook hard drive for cheap. It's a big pain, but I was able to do it with ours.

BTW, Leopard 10.5.8 runs just fine on our iBook 1.07.

[MAC365]

yes its a pain, takes several hours.

ive already done it on this white ibook, and i replaced hds several times on a clamshell ibook. they should have designed the ibook like the titanium powerbooks - hd simply reached by removing the bottom cover - nice and simple.