Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

petrol · Jul 17, 2003, 12:38 PM

Hi everyone,

My machine at work is an old beige G3 desktop. One day about a month ago I was working in OS 9, and one of those alert windows kept popping up saying that the hard drive was damaged, and I should repair it. If i closed the window, another would pop up a second later (I assume the next time it accessed the drive). I shut down and ran Disk Warrior. I foolishly told it to go ahead and replace my volume with the repaired one. The replaced volume had almost all the files in the root level of the hard disk, making the system installation unusable.

I took this chance to put in a slightly larger (6GB instead of 4) IDE hard drive and install the latest version of OS X. Everything was fine until yesterday, when the disk would start making clicking sound that would go on for a couple minutes at a time, freezing the machine while it did it. I was of course alarmed, so I backed up my crucial data to a Firewire drive and tried to run some disk utilities, but I couldn't get any to even find the disk on the bus after I restarted, and I have officially declared this hard drive dead, too.

Does anyone have any idea what might be giving me these problems? The IT guy at work says he's never seen it, and he's running out of hard drives to give me. I don't do anything especially disk-intensive at work, so i don't know what went wrong. Is it possible I have a bad IDE controller?

Thanks for any help,
Phil.

deboerjo · Jul 17, 2003, 03:44 PM

Originally posted by petrol:
I took this chance to put in a slightly larger (6GB instead of 4) IDE hard drive and install the latest version of OS X. Everything was fine until yesterday, when the disk would start making clicking sound that would go on for a couple minutes at a time, freezing the machine ...

That clicking noises strongly suggests a physical problem with the drive, caused by mechanical wear, not something drive-controller related. I would throw a 3rd drive in, make it something cheap like another 4G, and see if that one dies. If it does die, my first instinct would be to suspect your power supply before I pointed a finger at the IDE controller, but these beige G3s do have flakey IDE controllers in my experience, so I dunno.