[Fauldzy]

First of all I would like to point out how much of a fool I have been. There done. Now I beg you please stick with me on this one. The following report is quite long winded, but, I have done this for a reason! I am hoping the more I give to go on, the more likely someone is to make sense of my problem.. or maybe not? You decide...

I am a slightly foolish owner of a 14month old 15" alu 1.25 Powerbook running Panther 10.3.7.

I have been having a S.M.A.R.T Failure on my HD for almost a month. Occasionally after long periods (4+ hours) I will start to hear the HD clicking consistently and nothing will respond, everything will lock up, resulting in me having to power down using the power button

Usually if I give the PB a rest period to cool down it will be alright.

I had another crash. This time, after the crash it froze on startup (after the white screen, on the next screen when the progress bar is 'checking disks, initialising the system' etc.) Had to power down once again using the power button.

I then used Apple's disk utility on the restore CD and found errors ( Unfortunately I forgot to write these down!) i did this about four times and then the message said something along the lines of 'appears to be ok' and restarted my PB.

Loaded up fine as usual but still very slow. I think at this point I noticed that my usb pro mouse was no longer working, although it was still on (red light) so had to result to using my trackpad.

I then got to the user login screen and logged into my account. As I did this I received a dialogue box saying:

"There is a problem that prevents you from logging in at this time. Please contact your systems administrator for help" pressed OK and the PB continued to load up my user area.

This is when I noticed the Dock, desktop appearance change. None of my work files where in my user folder. However everything else within the HD folder remained in tact, inc non-standard apps in the apps folder (apps that I had installed myself) Accidently I opened something to do with bluetooth. This is where I was told

"No hardware for Bluetooth found on this computer" (As you probably well know Bluetooth came as standard on the PB, so it is there!)

At this point I decided to run repair permissions from the disk utility and i am assuming at this point, resulted in some type of error message once it had completed:

Verify Permissions For "disk0s9"
Determining correct file permissions
We are using special permissions for the file or directory ./system/library/
filesystems/cd9660.util. New permissions are 33261
Directory is missing ./Users/Shared
Permissions differ on ./private/var/log/install.log , should be -rw-r--r-- , they are -rw-r-----
Permissions differ on ./private/var/log/wtmp , should be -rw-r--r-- , they are -rw-r-----
The privileges have been verified or repaired on the selected volume
Permissions verification complete

Also I noticed something weird in the console:

console.log.6

Mac OSX Version 10.3.7 (Build 7s215)
2005-04-30 12:23:08 +0100
2005-04-30 12:28:55.553 Disk Utility [3953] ***Assertion failure in
-[NSMenuItem initWithTitle:action:keyEquivalent:] , Menus.subproj/
NSMenuItem.m:115
2005-04-30 12:28:55.553 Disk Utility[3953] Exception raised during posting
of notification.Ignored.exception Invalid parameter not satisfying:
aString !=nil

By the way when I say start up is slow: it takes about 3minutes to load from powerup to desktop fully loaded.

It takes roughly 20seconds from pressing the power button to receive the white screen.
The white screen with Apple logo in the centre appears for 1 minute
for 10 seconds there is just a blank blue screen.
then the 'checking disks' box appears for 20 seconds
From the log on screen to the desktop fully loaded takes another minute.

From what I can gather in Disk Utility, around 30gig of my HD is used. That means that my files have to be still there, somewhere? I guess they might not be retrievable though?

btw way.. did I not mention 'no backups made' , Hence what a fool I am! In my defence, just before the crash, I was looking on ebay for and external backup HD!.

Oh what a mess. Please, anyone, if you can make sense of any of this... HELP ME!

Kind regards - Chris.

[southtdi]

From what I can see there is only one thing to do. You are going to have to takte the computer in and have the hard drive replaced. Explain to them that when the machine is cold you can use the computer but it is slow. They can take the drive out, hook it into an external firewire module and do a tranfer back form the drive after reinstalling the OS onto the new drive. Not going to be cheap but not the end of the world either.

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally Posted by southtdi

From what I can see there is only one thing to do. You are going to have to takte the computer in and have the hard drive replaced. Explain to them that when the machine is cold you can use the computer but it is slow. They can take the drive out, hook it into an external firewire module and do a tranfer back form the drive after reinstalling the OS onto the new drive. Not going to be cheap but not the end of the world either.

14 months old? Well that's still covered under the 3 year AppleCare that you bought, right?

The hard drive in my 15" 1.25 GHz took a dump about 2 months ago, but I had Apple send me a new drive and I performed the replacement myself (I work at an Apple-certified repair center). Done and done!

[CarbonG4]

The Toshiba 80GB (5400) in my 15" 1.5GHz AL PowerBook also just died on me this weekend... pretty much the same issues that I've been reading from many AL owners. I've had several PowerBook G3's and Titanium G4's in the past -- they were definitely built w/ better parts

Anyway, mine won't boot anymore, and will not boot to the restore DVD or Tiger any longer. I had two partitions, and the main one lost its partition mapping preventing it from mounting as a volume.

//Carbon

[mrmister]

"I am a slightly foolish owner...I have been having a S.M.A.R.T Failure on my HD for almost a month."

Just so we're clear--you are not "slightly foolish", yopu are instead a "major dumbass".

Apple will replace the drive--as for getting your non-backed up data off the drive, good luck.

[pcummins]

It sounds like the disk has kicked to PIO (programmed IO) mode rather than DMA due to bad blocks. We had a 17" iMac that started crawling for no apparent reason, taking forever to boot up, load a Finder window etc. Naturally, said user had no backup, and there doesn't appear to be an easy way to get the files off, even loading the HDD onto another computer slowed that one to a crawl in Finder. This is what I did:

Target disk mode your PowerBook to another Mac running MacOS X (10.3/10.4).
If you can see your volumes that is good (it sounds like you can). (If you can't, there's another thing you can try, but I'll omit that for now. Priv msg me for details).
Run Fix Permissions and Repair Disk in Disk Utility. Should take ages if your drive has kicked to PIO mode.
Right click on your HDD and get it to Ignore Permissions.
Launch Terminal.
Run ditto with "ditto --rsrc -V /Volumes/<Your Dead HDD Name> /Volumes/<Your Working HDD Name>/Backup" making sure you have enough space. Tab works OK, so you can type the first few characters and get it to tab to auto-fill the rest out.

This may take a while. Like maybe overnight. If your disk really is in PIO mode, expect it to take a while. At least, you can see where it gets up to on the Terminal with all the text, so you can see where it's up to. If your HDD has bad blocks, some files may not copy as well, so you should check your data once it's backed up for any missing critical files. Don't bother checking /Applications, /System, /Library as they're expendable.

Once you have a backup, you can send your HDD in. We did this with the 17", the HDD was considered DOA and was replaced (fortunately, I had a backup as in the technique above) as they were unable to copy the data off. I always assume sending my computer in = HDD can be completely wiped, so I always make a backup first.

Anyhow, if you can get the above done you should be able to salvage most of your files assuming there's no catastrophic file system or bad block damage. As soon as you get SMART errors or the disk is crawling, make a backup as bad blocks are a good sign the disk is about to die on you (and you can't trust it ever again).

[Fauldzy]

Hello all!

Glad to say this disaster finished with a happy ending! All my important files are now saved!

A friend of my girlfriend discovered upon using 'search everywhere' (for the files I feared were gone) the results showed that they were infact in a folder called 'lost+found'. I myself never thought to try this simple method doh! I can only imagine that when I repaired my disk using the utility on the restore CD that it recovered and moved files to another, safe place! This must also explain why most my hardware was no longer being recognised or working as the drivers where no longer where they should be.

I do not know, this is only my theory. Anyone else is welcome to shed some light on this strange phenomenon.

Problem solved via two Seagate momentus HD's. I did a DIY replacement on my PB. Honestly it was so, so easy!! My main advice for anyone wishing to do PB repairs. READ MANUALS + TAKE YOUR TIME! Research and read a couple of different examples before you attempt to take apart. There are plenty of free detailed online manuals availible, just google.

So with my old HD out I used an external HD enclosure to connect it to my newly installed seagate HD and just transfered the files straight over, simple! I am now looking to use the second Seagate as a permanent backup HD to sit next to my PB at all times!

One word of advice here: Do not buy el cheapo USB enclosures for your ext HD's. Infact dont bother attempting to rely on using the USB bus to power an external drive! I found with my PB there is not enough bus power supplied. I bought an excellent ext firewire drive from: http://www.directusbstore.co.uk/cnb/...dCategoryID=22

Brillant price, easy to install, no drivers necessary. This was supplied with the FW 400 lead, an optional USB 2.0 / 1.1 lead and a power adaptor. Although you do not require further power as there is an adequate amount supplied though the FW.

Well I certainly learned the hard way, but I also learned a lot more about my PB!

Thanks so much for all of your help and suggestions - Kind regards, Chris

[simonjames]

Interesting

my 11 month old AL 17"PB's HD also died this week - the guys at the Apple Centre were able to put my PB into target disk mode so I managed to get most of my data off.

Seems Apple have another recall on their hands