I hope someone can help me here and please bare in mind as you read this that I'm not very good at this kind of thing.
I recently updated someone’s old G4 PowerMac (gigabit ethernet model if that is at all relevant) to Tiger for them and it’s been running relatively well until today. They were connecting up a new external HD because the old internal was only 20Gb but on startup, the mac went crazy. It went to the black screen displaying “Darwin/BSD (user-name-comp name) etc and then proceeded to spew out a long list of errors. Stupidly I didn’t take notes of them and only know there were errors mentioning 'overflows' etc, instead I hit restart (I know, I know). It went to the same screen again but didn't start spewing out errors. Instead it just wanted login details but for whatever reason, it simply would not allow anything to be entered for a password.
I disconnected everything unessential and tried starting up in single-user and then booting up form there. There was another long list of errors, different from before and this time including a lot of disk errors. Therefore I figured the HDD had just died. I couldn’t however boot from the software DVD as it just remained on the load screen so I opened the disk in Target disk mode on another comp and ran disk utility. Unfortunately it couldn’t verify it and instead disk utility reported failures immediately (failure on exit –9972). I figured this meant it was dead after a little google search and went out and bought a new internal HD. But what do you know, on returning and trying it one last time, it boots up fine. Now I’ve run the disk utility from the computer itself. It repaired permissions without any hiccups but it still can’t actually verify the disk and keeps telling me a failure has occurred on exit. Is it safe to say that this HDD is basically in it’s death throws and I might as well go ahead and replace it or have I missed something blindingly obvious?
Thanks to anyone in advance.
PS if a replacement is necessary, any tips on replacing a master hard drive which aren't in the manual would be very much appreciated.
Top
