[megasad]

When I switch it on, I hear a *chink* *chink* *chink* noise, about five-ten times. Also, after about three or four hours of use, the whole thing grinds to a halt; the hard drive / logic board makes horrible clinking sounds, like metal clunking due to convection, and then it seems as if the hard drive stops responding completely; the computer is still "on," but any attempt to access the hard drive causes spinny beach ball o' death to appear, and the only way out is to hold the power button down until it switches off. The longer my computer is on, the more this happens.

What is happening?

[engaged]

Originally posted by megasad:
When I switch it on, I hear a *chink* *chink* *chink* noise, about five-ten times. Also, after about three or four hours of use, the whole thing grinds to a halt; the hard drive / logic board makes horrible clinking sounds, like metal clunking due to convection, and then it seems as if the hard drive stops responding completely; the computer is still "on," but any attempt to access the hard drive causes spinny beach ball o' death to appear, and the only way out is to hold the power button down until it switches off. The longer my computer is on, the more this happens.

What is happening?

Sounds like The Death Of An iBook Hard Drive to me.

Back up if you can - and think about replacing it; i've done it on my Late 2001 iBook.

[megasad]

Originally posted by engaged:
Sounds like The Death Of An iBook Hard Drive to me.

Back up if you can - and think about replacing it; i've done it on my Late 2001 iBook.

How long do I have until it dies completely? I'm currently using the internal one only when I want to go online, when I have to take my iBook downstairs to connect it to the phone line. Most of the time I have it connected to my external firewire drive, running everything off of that. Will it be okay to use my iBook like this for a few more months? The thing is pretty much falling apart and instead of spending ~£100 for a battery, I don't know how much for a new hard drive (how much?), I'll probably save up and but a new machine in a few months.

Um... basically, is it safe for me to use my iBook running off the external firewire drive? Will the internal drive suffer because of this?

PS - Why does the hard drive die like this? Anything I've done?

[megasad]

Anyone? Does anyone know why the hard drive dies in my iBook? Is it my fault? Or is it someone else's? Or is it no-one's? You tell me now?

[dreilly1]

Do you use the external drive as a boot drive? I believe that OS X keeps its swap file on the boot drive.

I don't think there's any reason why you can't keep using the external drive as long as you want to (of course, it isn
t as portable).

Oh, and hard drives die, sometimes.