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raster hippie · 06:58 PM

apologies if this has already been covered... the search function doesn't appear to be working on this board, and i don't have the time to scavenge through loads of posts!

i upgraded my powerbook G4 1.25ghz 15" from panther to tiger the other day. everything was running smoothly for the first hour or so, and then my hard drive started making these horrendously loud grinding noises. this was followed by the OS completely locking up (spinning beach ball), and me having to restart. this happened a few times, and then eventually it wouldn't boot up at all... so i had to boot off my firewire drive (fortunately i did a complete clone of my system before installing panther).

it took a couple of restarts booted from the fw drive to get the internal drive to mount on my desktop. i ran disk utility, and it found a problem: "illegal leaf count", which it apparently fixed. as soon as it fixed it, the grinding noise stopped.

so i boot back into tiger, and it happens all over again.
i reset my pram, and then wiped the internal drive, and did a clean install.

everything seemed to be a-okay again with the fresh installation, the drive grinding noise was gone. so i started copying my old files over very slowly.. making sure to only bring documents and applications over that weren't 3rd party hacks. the only preference files i copied over were for mail, safari, ical and itunes.

but not long after, things just became really slow and unresponsive, and tiger started completely locking up again, about 4-5 times an hour. i got the spinning beach ball of death and the only way to get rid of it was with a hard restart. i'm now booted off my firewire drive again, because i was sick of the constant crashes. my internal drive is no longer mounting, and i think it's dead.

has anyone had any problems similar to this? is it even possible for an operating system to completely KILL a hard drive like that? i never had any hardware problems with this powerbook prior to installing panther. fortunately i have apple care, but i don't have any free minutes left on my phone to call them with at the moment (i'm a poor student with no landline

). i'm hoping somebody might be able to lend me some insight into this situation.

thanks

TETENAL · May 11, 2005, 06:08 PM

It's possible that your hard drive is failing. This happens to drives without being anybody's fault.

You can open Disk Utility, select the drive (not just the volume) on the left and click the Info button. If the S.M.A.R.T.-status is not verified, than you know your drive is broken (though it might even when the status is verified).

Cadaver · May 11, 2005, 06:09 PM

Do you use or have installed Entourage? Symptoms like that (slow, unresponsive, lots of disk thrashing) can be caused by Spotlight attempting to read through the Entourage database. Tell Spotlight to skip the Microsoft Users folder (I think that's what its called) and it should stop.

raster hippie · May 11, 2005, 07:05 PM

no, i don't have entourage. i do have microsoft word and excel installed though. spotlight finished all of its indexing within the first couple hours of installation, and the problems persisted, so i'm not sure if that could be a culprit or not.

i'll run disk utility again in the morning (it's late here now)... hopefully my internal drive will decide to come back to life and mount again so that i can do that.

and as a side note... i've got a "techtools deluxe" CD that came with my applecare package, but it will not let me boot off of this CD. every time i try, it either freezes on the grey apple startup screen, or the grey apple turns into a circle with a diagonal line down it (like a no trespassing sign), and then just stalls there. anyone know what's up with that?

thanks for your help

kcmac · May 11, 2005, 07:08 PM

My 12" PB hard drive died just before Tiger was released. Guess Panther killed my HD.

chezpaul · May 11, 2005, 08:17 PM

Well I've had the same problems...
I re did a clean instal (wiping my HD) and it seems to be holding. Even though I do get the beachball and eratic freezes... (well only two so far but compared to none before). I'm crossing my fingers.

wadesworld · May 11, 2005, 08:34 PM

No, operating systems do not kill hard drives. You just have a hard drive that went bad.

Wade

SMacTech · May 11, 2005, 08:54 PM

Originally Posted by wadesworld

No, operating systems do not kill hard drives. You just have a hard drive that went bad.

Wade

Tiger wasn't nice to my hard drive either. I experienced corruption on my drive after it 'spotlighted' recent changes to a database. The changes to the database files were extensive and the contents changed in a large number of files [+20k]. Because they were text files, spotlight indexed them. I have since eliminated that folder from Spotlight.

While mdimport [spotlight] was running, my Mac kernel panicked. A first for this 3yr old mdd867. After that happened Disk Utility found a number of file bitmap errors and orphaned files. DU thought it fixed my drive and found no problems.

However, reading, copying, or trying to delete a particular database file will KP this Mac every single time. My only option now is to reformat or try DiskWarrior.

I filed a bug report but have not heard anything from Apple.