[threestain]

I've got a 2003 1GHz Tibook, 512MB Ram, SD, no changes since purchase, no probs til now. Unfortunately at the time I didn't buy the applecare.

Right, I've been having some problems recently with an external firewire drive. This I think is being sorted with the drive being replced on warranty by seagate. However, the problems haven't stopped with me not using the drive:

1. Over the last few days my laptop hard drive has developed an error, that disk utility can't fix. Disc Warrior is in the post to me, so hopefully that will fix the directory structure. Fingers crossed.

2. The battery seems to be going wonky. But no more than ever.

3. There seems to be a problem with my connectors on the back - USB ones are a bit hit and miss for working, and the firewire one is causing me concern - I literally just gently unplugged a firewire cable (not attached to anything) when the TiBook was asleep and was greeted with the 'you must restart your computer" for the second time in about 3 days.

Is this just a hard drive failing, or is the whole thing dying in a heap? Unfortunately I'm about two weeks away from the nearest apple store or reseller, so things aren't good there... any tips?

[Raining Down in Texas]

I have the same machine, and my hard drive just died a couple months ago. If you have Panther or Tiger, run the Disk Utility program and select your hard drive in the left pane (make sure you select the drive, and not the partition on the drive). The SMART status for the drive will appear at the lower right. If your drive thinks it is physically OK, it will say "Verified".

My old hard drive began exhibiting some strange behavior that resulted in crashes and lots of disk errors; when I checked the SMART status it said "Failing". I immediately cloned to a Firewire drive, bought a new internal drive for the Powerbook, and cloned back to the new drive and everything has been fine since.

Look at the bright side - if this turns out to be the only problem with your machine, replacing the hard drive will be substantially cheaper than what Applecare would have cost.

[threestain]

Well according to Disk Utility, I have a minor header (I think) error, but the SMART status is fine. However, even get the 'you must restart' screen when I try and Restart! I wish the royal mail would actually work and send me my bloody disk warrior!

[threestain]

Well disk warrior seems to have worked its magic - god its good!