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rozwado1 · May 1, 2004, 02:28 PM

I got my friend's iBook 500 in target disk mode connected to mine. Her HD has been experiencing problems (can't boot past grey apple logo) and needs to be zeroed out. No noises, no obvious hardware failures with the HD, except it won't finish rebuilding in DiskWarrior. Here's what I see in Disk Utility:

The Macintosh HD is greyed out. Does that mean that erasing won't work, that the HD is dead, what?
Here's more info about the drive:

When I try to erase, the progress bar stays like that and the HD doesn't spin or make any attempt to move. fsck -y or Diskwarrior didn't help at all. Time for a new HD?

I hate taking iBooks apart...

angelmb · May 1, 2004, 03:17 PM

The 'Mount' icon in the toolbar seems dimmed, right?, that is, I guess if you could to mount it, you had done it.

rozwado1 · May 1, 2004, 05:29 PM

Originally posted by angelmb:
The 'Mount' icon in the toolbar seems dimmed, right?, that is, I guess if you could to mount it, you had done it.

Well, the drive doesn't mount until I open Disk Utility and it finds the drive. It used to mount without a problem, but now the file system is F'd.

himself · May 2, 2004, 01:29 AM

Have you tried booting and erasing using a Mac OS X Install CD?

rozwado1 · May 2, 2004, 05:02 PM

Found out the HD is actually dead (thanks to proton on the IRC channel). He helped me through the dd command to try and clear out the first few blocks of the drive. It kept returning an invalid command; hence dead. When the new HD gets here, I'll take apart the old to find out what happened.