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Walt · Sep 12, 2005, 12:19 PM

Hey there,

I've had a 2nd gen powerbook 15" 1.25Ghz superdrive laptop now for about a year. During the year it has worked seamlessly up until today:

I booted it up, loaded iTunes and it appeared the hard drive was having a hard time trying to read the mp3s. The music kept stopping and starting etc. This problem then went away. I then loaded Logic up and the powerbook had a hard time playing back anything. Then apps like Adium and Safari starting playing up (doing nothing).

Finally the good ol' Apple BSOD flared up (the "You need to restart the computer" message), so I do as I am told. Upon restart, the Apple logo I am greeted with when the machine is booting up looks corrupted. I then get faced with the same "you need to restart" message. I've rebooted it a few times now and nothing has seemed to have changed. I've tried booting into safe mode however it doesn't bypass the message. Booting into single user or verbose mode yields the following snippets of messages:

[FONT=Courier New]BSD root: disk0s9, major 14, minor 9
jnl: open: journal magic is bad (0x0 != 0x4a4e4c78)
hfs: late jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0).
panic(cpu 0): nfs_boot_init failed with 6

...

panic: We are hanging here...[/FONT]

I'm probably going to try and send this to a repair shop tomorrow. But while I'm here, do you people reckon my HDD is trashed? Would any data on it be retrievable?

I would have tried to boot the system up with the Panther install disc, but alas, the CD ROM drive decided to pack up a few days ago too...

ibook_steve · Sep 12, 2005, 01:57 PM

I would boot up in Firewire target disk mode and get anything off of there that you can. Sounds like a dying hard drive to me.

Steve

Walt · Sep 12, 2005, 02:04 PM

Originally Posted by ibook_steve

I would boot up in Firewire target disk mode and get anything off of there that you can. Sounds like a dying hard drive to me.

Steve

Cheers. I was just looking in to this. Looks like I need to find my mate with a Powerbook before I get this beast repaired after all!

Walt · Sep 12, 2005, 02:34 PM

Hmm. Actually, would it be possible to use a PC with a firewire port as a host for FireWire target drive mode?

ibook_steve · Sep 12, 2005, 03:14 PM

Sure. Any machine with a FW port will work. The Powerbook will just look like a Firewire hard drive to the computer you use.

Steve

Edit: I forgot something. The PC may not be able to see the Mac hard drive depending on how you formatted it. Somebody can probably recommend software to get around this problem.

Walt · Sep 12, 2005, 03:45 PM

Originally Posted by ibook_steve

Sure. Any machine with a FW port will work. The Powerbook will just look like a Firewire hard drive to the computer you use.

Steve

Edit: I forgot something. The PC may not be able to see the Mac hard drive depending on how you formatted it. Somebody can probably recommend software to get around this problem.

Fantastic info. Cheers for the help ibook steve!