[pisosse]

This is going to be a long and sad story but hang in please you might have a nice solution.

Was redy to upgrad my ol' 400mhz G4(agp graphic) to panther and made a nice back up of my 2 internal drives, the original IBM 10 gig and a additional Western Digital 120 gig drive. I had my system on the WD and used the IBM drive as a backup(no system on that one)...

Cleaned out the WD from the panther cd and tried to make a clean install which got me a "can't install essentials" error. Well... saw something about ical in the installer log and continuet to reinstall 10.2.8 and upgrade anything (especially ical that i didn't have previously). Fine then... everything was funky dory after the initial reboot but the next day i booted up to the blinking quistionmark folder. Then i booted from CD erased the disk and tried to reinstall but couldn't. When I ran "verifi dsik" it told me that i probably had a directory problem. Being new to this and stupid i tried solving this problem by formating the disk again before i finally got me Disk Warrior and before somebody told me how long it could take I forced quit the app coz i thought i was hanging. Then I left DW to it over night only to find it helplessly frozen. Then i booted in single user mode to find the kernl panic saying" invalid btree node size".
At this time i began hearing a od noize when the damn thing tried to spin up, like it was trying 2 or 3 time before it finnaly spun up.
Now i couldn't connect to the drive with any app at all and before that i had to disconnect the HD and boot up and the reconnect the disk for a reboot just to see it. The last thing i get now is a kernel panic saying " unable to find driver for this platform"

seems to me that i have a serios directory problem but what do you say wiseguys?

HD redy to trash??

thanks for any input

pisosse

[tooki]

Hmm, it could well be a bad disk. I'd also check your Panther install disc, you shouldn't be getting installation errors like that!

The only time I've seen the "no driver for this platform" error was when a Mac OS X system had its /System/ folder moved. I suppose severe disk corruption could have the same effect.

But if the drive has trouble spinning up, that's... bad.

You said you have Disk Warrior, right? Is it version 3? (If not, upgrade!)

DW 3 has the ability to enable S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, which is the drive's internal self-diagnostics. Once you use DW to check S.M.A.R.T. once, the drive will continue to monitor itself and record anything out of the ordinary. Subsequent S.M.A.R.T. checks with DW will display any error messages the drive has stored. (And if you see ANY message other than "the drive is functioning normally", replace the drive!)

tooki

[superlarry]

I've had the same problem with WD drives three times (both windows and OSX). I'll never buy one again, but that's just me.

All of them eventually worked. How? I don't know. In all cases, I just gave up for a while and tried later.

Possible solution: Check your jumper settings - "CS" (cable select) and Master will make a difference with WD drives, even if the cable is designating the drive as master. There's also a difference between setting it as "Master" and not setting a jumper at all (one means you have a slave drive attached, the other that you don't).

Good luck. At any rate, I doubt your drive is bad. You might want to install the system to another drive (i.e. the IBM) and use the 120 GB for storage. There shouldn't be a problem with this - at least, there hasn't been in my experience.

[pisosse]

Thanks guys

My problem that i have no contact with the drive at all right now. But I managed to install a system on the small IBM but still can't see the disk. I'll try and have a little "fun" with jumper settings.

Allso when i try and boot from the ibm disk and have the other disk connected wither jumpers on Cable Select I get the no entry sign

I'll get back with progress if any.

[pisosse]

Tried different jumper settings with absolutly no effect. this HD won't show in anything i do. And the scary part is that it now don't spin up after serveral tries....

huh...?

[ichou]

I've been having a similar problem about once every 2-3 months. When I had a SCSI drive which was noisier, I'd hear the drive repeatedly spin up and spin down. I'd be forced to hard reboot because I couldn't access anything on the drive. When it rebooted I'd get a flashing question mark. The only way I could get it to recognize the drive again was to push the CUDA switch next to the PRAM battery. Occasionally I would have to boot up by disconnecting the second internal hard drive from the SCSI chain. Let it boot up, shut down and then I could reconnect the 2nd drive. Although eventually the odd failure caused 2 SCSI hard drives to completely die. I ended up removing the SCSI drive and adapter card and installing an IDE drive to the onboard IDE controller and this seemed to work much better. I then added the SCSI adapter card back and it ran fine so I connected the SCSI drives back as external drives. About 2 months of running fine the same thing happened with the IDE (boot) drive spinning down. Removed the SCSI and everything was fine for a couple months. Added a Sonnet Temp 4+4 SATA adapter with Seagate 300GB SATA internal drive as a 2nd drive and my IDE as the boot. It ran fine for 2 days before the same failure. Had to reset the CUDA switch and disconnect the SATA drive from the adapter card before it would boot up. As far as I can tell, everything seems fine as long as I only have one internal drive connected. I do have an external firewire drive that has been connected through all configurations. Wonder if it could be an odd intermittent Power Supply failure? I did the Power Supply Voltage test and pin 22 is 27.5 volts (spec'ed at 28V) and pin 10 is 11.7 volts (spec'ed at 12V). Other pins are measured at exactly what they are spec'ed at. Is the power supply just borderline? Adding an extra drive or controller is causing the voltage to dip just below the power required for the hard drives? could explain why it burned out 2 drives.

configuration:
PowerMac G4 500MHz DP Gigabit Ethernet. ATI Radeon 9000, Sonnet Tempo SATA 4+4, 7 Port NitroAV Firewire 800/USB 2.0 host adapter, internal IBM/Hitachi 40GB IDE hard drive, internal Seagate 300GB SATA hard drive.