Okay. This has been a problem lasting four days. iBook G4 933 mHz
Day One: Odd noises were coming from the lower left part of the case. Mostly somewhat circular noises. These persisted. If the laptop bottom was held at an angle, the computer would freeze until I moved back level.
Day Two: Then it froze. Wouldn't start up. It would stay on the Apple screen with the thing running around. I ran Apple Hardware and it reported 2STF/8/8: ATA - 100 ata - 6 - Master. I ran Disk Utility from the Install CD, and it found no problems. It deigned to start up, and I immediatly backed up all my data (except music and inexplicably my Quicken data). Searching online, I found that it might be the cache, so I ran Disk Utility to repair the disk again, logged in with the shift key down, and immediately ran Disk Utility to repair permissions. As always, there were permissions to repair. I can run the program back to back, and it'll say there's bad permissions. Then I cleared the computer's cache.
Day Three: Worked fine. Near the end of the night, odd noises were coming again, but I decided to just leave it alone for a day. Forgot to back up Quicken.
Day Four: While in the middle of typing, the computer decided to stall for a minute and then work on a continual basis. This mostly happened when I was playing music through iTunes. Then it froze for several minutes. When it unfroze, I tried to quit programs and shut it down. It froze again, so I held down the power key. Restarted with the Apple Hardware CD, and they gave me the error of 2STF/3/3: ATA - 100 ata - 6 - Master and then said " The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972). Anoyed, I started up from the install CD and ran Disk Utility. This happened:
Checking Catalog file.
Keys out of order
Rebuilding Catalog B- tree.
After remaining on that screen for a couple mintues, the application stopped and said "The underlying task reported failure on exit. It also said Repair attempted on 1 volume, 0 HFS Volumes repaired, 1 Volume could not be repaired.
I've run the two programs a couple times since, and now the Hardware test is saying nothing's wrong, while Disk Utility will give me the above messages.
Is the hard drive gone? That's what I'm getting from my online searches. Is there something else I could do? Is there anyway I can get my Quicken info off? It's not the end of the world if I can't, but it'd be nice.
Any help would be appreciated.
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