[JLFanboy]

So recently I took it upon myself to upgrade my family's six year old Bondi iMac to Panther. My parent's had had enough of the constant crashing of OS 9 and after doing a little research I decided to take the plunge. Everything went very smoothly, but there's this nagging (maybe) problem that's been driving me nuts. Anyway, here are my steps.

- Upgrade the RAM, from 96 to 288 megs. Decided to do it myself. Install was long and involved but seemed to work.

- Install Panther. Wiped the hard drive and partitioned it (we'd replaced the 4 gig drive with a 20 gigger a long time ago). Installed Panther on the 8 gig partition.

Okay, so not many steps at all. Panther runs fine. Nowhere near as fast as even my TiBook 400, but so much more functionality than 9. All in all, couldn't be better.

Here's the issue. Ever since I did the upgrade the hard drive's been acting weird. When I'm just using the computer I can hear the drive just stop spinning. It barely even spins down. A couple of seconds later it just spins back up again, and the process repeats. When the drive isn't spinning the machine just stops. This worries me enough, but drive activity sounds really violent, like something is really wrong with the drive.

So any ideas? Could it simply be the way a partitioned drive acts? This is my first time using one. Could there we something I accidentally did when I opened the case to install the RAM? I mean, the install checked the drive and it seemed to check out fine. Is this just normal for a Bondi iMac running Panther?

So that's my (maybe not a) problem. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[sideus]

That is either A) Energy Saver is spinning down the drive and some sort of activity is causing the drive to spin up again or B) The drive is going bad.

Go to the Energy Save preference panel and uncheck the spin hard drive down when possible option.

That iMac probably doesn't have S.M.A.R.T. hard drive support otherwise open Disk Utility and see if there is a S.M.A.R.T. status for the drive. I don't think it will be there though.

[iREZ]

Why partition a 20gig HD?

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally posted by iREZ:
Why partition a 20gig HD?

On the older G3 iMacs, OS X will only work if it resides in the first 8 GB of a drive.

[Group51]

Originally posted by SpaceMonkey:
On the older G3 iMacs, OS X will only work if it resides in the first 8 GB of a drive.

Yes, but that only means you can't put it on the second partition. If you don't partition at all, the issue doesn't arise.

[tooki]

Not true.

On Beige G3s and tray-load G3 iMacs, any bootable OS X partition must be completely contained within the first 8GB of the disk. Since the partition table is also at the beginning of the disk, it means that in practice, the boot partition should be made 7.9GB, not 8.0GB.

tooki