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billy_2004 · Jan 3, 2004, 10:47 PM

I turned on my Pismo this morning, and the nice apple logo came on as usual. You know how there is a delay before the spinning circle thingy? (Do you know what im talking about??) Well, as soon as this is suposed to show up, the screen goes completely garbled. Meaning...lines across the screen...it looks like the screen is cracked across the middle. At this point, the hard drive stops humming.
I have tried booting from every CD I have. Holding down "C" as I start up, I have tried Utility disks, nothing works. Finally, I popped open the keyboard and replaced it with my puny 6 Gig(by the way, this is a 20 Gig). Anyhow, the computer booted fine, and I loaded OS 10.2 onto it. But my question is: WHAT happened to my 20 Gig hard drive??? Is it dead? Is there ANY way around this? I would like to avoid having to replace it, and I certainly cannot work with a 6 Gig for what Im doing. If anyone has any suggestions they are reeeallly appreciated, thank you!

I am me · Jan 4, 2004, 12:31 AM

If you have access to one, try installing it into a external firewire case. Then you be able to use Disk utility to check the S.M.A.R.T. status. If it doesn't pass S.M.A.R.T. its definetly dead, otherwise try format it.

How old is the drive?

billy_2004 · Jan 4, 2004, 01:51 AM

The drive is 2 years old. Fujitsu. I will look into the firewire drive idea. Thanks. Is there any other way(if i could not get a hold of one), to test it to see if it is dead? I had an idea, if I were to get a hold of a PC laptop, boot it up with a floppy, format it that way? Then it might be recognizable and I could initialize it and format it in HFS in the disk utility? IM not sure, Im just guessing.

Detrius · Jan 4, 2004, 10:04 AM

Unfortunately, the fact that you can't boot from CD says that your hard drive's controller board is failing. Being the master device on the bus, the hard drive instructs the CD-ROM drive on what to do. This isn't working, which is why you can't boot from CD.

If you could find a way to get the drive to function as slave rather than master, it may work. However, this would basically require a desktop machine to plug it into and an adapter to go from the laptop hard drive plug to the standard IDE plug. Unfortunately, I don't know whether or not these settings can be changed on a laptop hard drive.

The only other possibility is if you had another hard drive that is the exact same make and model, you could switch the controller boards. Your drive manufacturer may be able to help you with this.

robinpow · Jan 5, 2004, 01:47 AM

It will take a power user, to help, but I had a problem where my 15" powerbook would not boot, from the hard drive, and refused to the CD too. I don't remember the keys I had to use, but one of the power users had me do a strange combanation of keys and it forced the Mac to Boot off the CD.

Not sure if I can find my notes from tthen, but will look.

Detrius · Jan 5, 2004, 07:12 AM

Originally posted by robinpow:
It will take a power user, to help, but I had a problem where my 15" powerbook would not boot, from the hard drive, and refused to the CD too. I don't remember the keys I had to use, but one of the power users had me do a strange combanation of keys and it forced the Mac to Boot off the CD.

Not sure if I can find my notes from tthen, but will look.

You could try shift-option-command-delete. That will ignore the internal hard drive. If it were a SCSI machine, you could add a number key to tell it to try to boot off a specific SCSI ID. However, if the board on the hard drive is fubar, the machine will still not be able to boot from the CD-ROM (assuming IDE, which the Pismo is).

As an Apple Certified Technician that actually understands the Unix underpinnings, I would think that I count as a "Power User."

One more thing to try: boot the machine holding command-v. This tells OS X to boot into verbose mode. There is the possibility that you are having seperate issues. This may tell you why OS X is bailing on you. In addition, you can reset PRAM and reset the Open Firmware/NVRAM.

theolein · Jan 5, 2004, 11:57 AM

If you can't boot from CD (The OSX install CD would be the best), it might be the IDE controller being defect, but it might also be something else. I have a Lombard, which is simlar, which does not acknowledge the "c" key for CD booting and the only way in which I can change a boot volume other than from the OS itself is by booting into Open Firmware and selecting boot volume manually.

The one thing you can do, now that you have the 6GB drive installed is to set the CD with the Mac OSX install CD in it as the boot volume from the OS and then to power down, put the 20GB drive back in and boot up to see if it will recognise the CD. If it does, then you can try and use the disk utility on the 20GB drive.