[fourstar_work]

hi all,

i'm typing this plea for help from my office desk at work because my g4/450dp is having serious problems and it seems to centre around the two hard drives i have (both of which are now corrupt).

i have two hard drives, a 30gig (which came with the g4) and an extra 20gig. i have the 30gig partitioned into four drives, one drive for mac os x system, one for os 9.2.2 system and two other drives for misc. files. my other 20gig is partition into 3 drives with apps, files etc.

i've been noticing some unusual things happening for a few months, when booted in os 9, programs would be unexpectedly quitting almost daily. i though that it may have been a ram problem, so i ran 'dimm first aid' and it reported a problem with one of my 128meg sticks, which i removed. however, this didn't solve the problem. unexpected errors were still occurring.

this all came to a head yesterday when the os 9 drive became un-mountable. i booted into os x, and tried repairing the drive with a number of tools, disk warrior found a whole page of errors but it reported that it wasn't able to repair as the disk was too badly damaged. os x's disk utility also had no luck, so i erased the drive and ran it through the norton disk doctor (public beta), it ran through fine and reported no errors and that the disk was ok.

upon rebooting into os x, only one drive was visible, the mac os x drive. all others were reported as unmountable and damaged in disk utility.

so i tried booting off my mac os 9.2.1 cd, it booted up ok and a number of the drives showed up (but not all). however the finder reported that there was a problem with the 'mac os 9.2.1 drive'.... however that was the cd ?? i was a little confused at this point. i opened up one of the mounted drives (one off the 20gig partitioned drive) and started to scroll down through my files. the finder froze. i force-quit the finder and it re-loaded. only to find that on that drive i just scrolled down through, half of the files were missing. gone.

is this just a case of two corrupted hard drives or something more sinister?

if anyone has any ideas, thoughts, suggestions they will certainly be more than appreciated.

cheers,

[saru boy]

What types of drives are they (IBM, Western Digital, Maxtor)?

It seems your CD drive works ok. To check if the ATA controller for your harddrives is fried, you may want to attach one of the drives to the ATA channel that your CD is on (I assume you don't have anything occupying that bay under the cd drive). Make sure you set the jumpers on the drive to slave when you do attach it under the CD drive. If the hard drive still has problems, I'd say your drives are hosed.

Depending on the warranties on the drives, you may be able to return them for new drives, although you'll lose all your data. If I were you, I would get another drive and backup all your essential data before the drives completely become unusable.

[fourstar_work]

Originally posted by saru boy:
<STRONG>Depending on the warranties on the drives, you may be able to return them for new drives, although you'll lose all your data. If I were you, I would get another drive and backup all your essential data before the drives completely become unusable.</STRONG>

thanks for your thoughts. they're most appreciated.

i took both drives (the 20gig is a seagate, the 30gig a western digital) out of my g4/450dp and connected them to a g4/733 quicksilver (booting into the 733's os 9.2) the drives still had the same problems.

i opened disk warrior, it enabled the drives to be mounted and i salvaged almost all of my data from both drives. thankyou disk warrior !

i'm now in the middle of doing a low-level format on both drives. will the low-level format fix the drive? or do drives, when the get to a stage like this, not able to be repaired by re-formatting?

if not, i guess i'll be in the market for a few new drives. or one at least.

any thoughts?

cheers.

[saru boy]

Originally posted by fourstar_work:
<STRONG>

i'm now in the middle of doing a low-level format on both drives. will the low-level format fix the drive? or do drives, when the get to a stage like this, not able to be repaired by re-formatting?

if not, i guess i'll be in the market for a few new drives. or one at least.

any thoughts?

cheers.</STRONG>

I'm not quite sure, but I would assume that a low level format would isolate the bad sectors on your hard drives and allow you to use the drives, albeit at a smaller capacity since the bad sectors will have effectively vanished and not be counted in the hard drive's capacity. Of course, there's always the danger that the drives will develop more bad sectors (with similar results as before).

[Cipher13]

If Disk Warrior can't fix it, it can't be fixed. Format.

You can recover data with Data Rescue also.

The cause of your problems was OS 9.22.

[Worboren]

If you managed to save your data then you're a hellava lucky one already! The format should do the trick unless the drives are physically damaged, but I didn't know you can do a low level format these days. In fact, I think it's not recommended on any drive released in the past 3 years. Anyway, the formatting utility told me about this the last time I tried to do a low-level format.

What's up with 9.2.2 btw? Does it often behave like this?

[jtc]

It's suspicious that both drives are corrupt. It sounds like you've installed the second drive, so there are a few things you should check.
1. Make sure the IDE cables are not loose on the mobo or on the drives.
2. Make sure the master/slave is set properly. Check the support web page for each drive manufacturer (the settings could be different if they are not the same brands), there should be a graphic with the correct jumper settings.

low-level formats are not needed on IDE hard drives (in fact I seen warnings against low level formatting newer drives).

Get in the habit of running disk first aid or disk warrior (my choice) once or twice a month. This can correct problems before they become severe.

[ 02-01-2002: Message edited by: jtc ]

[Gregory]

Running Drive Setup to initialize, followed by Test function will map out bad sectors (it has a sector blocks just for this - no loss, but limited to 100 or so). I'd get a FW case and another IDE drive. In fact, good to have an extra drive on hand at all times, maybe even already formatted with a good backup set but off line on the shelf.

Sounds like you trusted your drives to the Norton X beta?? I trust Disk Warrior - all it usually does is create a new directory based on files found on the drive and report difference and offer a Preview to copy/backup). But I also always follow up DW with Norton.

Loose power cable, ribbon, jumper worked its way off... or just the normal failure rate of IDE?
www.xlr8yourmac.com has a drive database of user reports, and www.storagereview.com (still online) has a drive reliability database (hopefully back up) of 1000's os user experience with various models.

I'd be at a loss w/o the ease of firewire for backup truthfully the way things are with OS X and 9.2.2 - I'm best off never using OS 9 and just staying in OS X.

The cause of the problems, if it was RAM, could have corrupted the drive, and operating system to the point a clean install would have been in order.

[fourstarcltv]

thanks to everyone for their help.

i now have finished formatting both drives, and have transfered all of my files back to them.

everything seems to be running well.

thanks again !

cheers,

[fourstarcltv]

well, it seems as though i spoke too soon.

whilst i'm booted into os x, everything seems to be running fine, however when in 9.2.1 (a freshly installed system) i continually receive a number of unexpected quits with photoshop, dreamweaver and internet explorer.

there was type 2, 4 and 11 errors. when i went to the startup disk control panel, the system froze and i had to do a hard-restart back into os x.

this is exactly what was happening pre the hard drive reformat.

anyone have any idea what is happening?

any help most appreciated !

cheers,

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by fourstarcltv:
<STRONG>well, it seems as though i spoke too soon.

whilst i'm booted into os x, everything seems to be running fine, however when in 9.2.1 (a freshly installed system) i continually receive a number of unexpected quits with photoshop, dreamweaver and internet explorer.

there was type 2, 4 and 11 errors. when i went to the startup disk control panel, the system froze and i had to do a hard-restart back into os x.

this is exactly what was happening pre the hard drive reformat.

anyone have any idea what is happening?

any help most appreciated !

cheers,</STRONG>

How many times must I say that OS 9.2 is the cause?

Go back to 9.1 full install, or 9.04 if you can't get the 9.1 full.

[fourstar_work]

Originally posted by Cipher13:
[QB]

How many times must I say that OS 9.2 is the cause?QB]

twice should do it.

i'll try it with a 9.1 clean-install tonight.

thanks again.

[fourstarcltv]

well, after a week of tinkering with all parts of my mac to try and find the source of the problem i've finally discovered what was causing all the problems.

RAM. that's right, two sticks of RAM which i had installed were causing all the data corruption, system freezes, type xx errors etc.

i ran tech tool's RAM test and it found that the two sticks failed the various tests, i took the sticks out, installed a fresh copy of 9.2.1 and all has been well for the past 24 hours (no unexpected quits at all !)

thanks to all who offered their thoughts, it was most appreciated.

cheers,

[Big Mac]

Just out of curiosity, what vendor did you buy the RAM from?

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by fourstarcltv:
<STRONG>well, after a week of tinkering with all parts of my mac to try and find the source of the problem i've finally discovered what was causing all the problems.

RAM. that's right, two sticks of RAM which i had installed were causing all the data corruption, system freezes, type xx errors etc.

i ran tech tool's RAM test and it found that the two sticks failed the various tests, i took the sticks out, installed a fresh copy of 9.2.1 and all has been well for the past 24 hours (no unexpected quits at all !)

thanks to all who offered their thoughts, it was most appreciated.

cheers,</STRONG>

9.2, as well as the latest firmware updates, decrease RAM-error tolerance.

[fourstarcltv]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
<STRONG>Just out of curiosity, what vendor did you buy the RAM from?</STRONG>

i picked up both sticks from the local pc dealer, one stick (128meg) is labeled as 'NCP', the other (256meg) as 'Kowa'

i guess i'll be going with a proven brand next time around.

cheers,

[Scotttheking]

Quality ram is a good thing.

If you buy cheap ram it may screw things up.
I've never gone wrong buying from crucial.com

Remember, price isn't everything.