[SeattleWRX]

My G4 Powerbook 12" will not boot. It's been running sluggish lately and stalling, now, it will not boot at all.

It goes into the blue screen and says starting OS X, goes about 5% then turn to the dark grey screen where all you can see is the black mouse cursor.

I have no idea what is wrong and how to fix it.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

Mike

[fisherKing]

try booting up from the cd that came with it (the first one);
hold down the "C" key.

run disk utility.

start there, report back...

[SeattleWRX]

Not good:

This Drive has reported a fatal hardware error to Disk Utility.

S.M.A.R.T. Status Failing

Does this mean I need to buy a new harddrive? I had a feeling it was dying.

Thanks for your help guys.

Thank god i backed up everything.


Mike

[Apfhex]

'Fraid so. Good thing you have a backup!!

[SeattleWRX]

I really wish I knew what caused this, I've only had the computer 16 months. I guess this is why I should have bought the applecare...

Lesson Learned.

Upgrade suggestions? My current one is 60, and I don't think it was enough. How much and where should I order from?

I think I can do it myself given the right tools.

[Barry]

>I really wish I knew what caused this

as explained to me once...a long time ago in a galaxy far far away a random quark was emitted and started on a long journey that happened to end by hitting your hard drive just when it was writting some critical system info, causing what should have been a 0 to be written as a 1 or written as a 1 that should have been a 0. when your system tried to reterive that info it couldn't understand the code, so it crashed. in other words a random event in the universe.

[SeattleWRX]

Originally Posted by Barry

>I really wish I knew what caused this

as explained to me once...a long time ago in a galaxy far far away a random quark was emitted and started on a long journey that happened to end by hitting your hard drive just when it was writting some critical system info, causing what should have been a 0 to be written as a 1 or written as a 1 that should have been a 0. when your system tried to reterive that info it couldn't understand the code, so it crashed. in other words a random event in the universe.

Thanks. This has nothing to do with the durablility of Apple products or the powerbook line whatsoever? Sounds to me like a hard drive issue and only a hard drive issue.

I've ordered a Hitachi 100Gig 5400rpm Hard drive and will be installing it next week?

Any clues for rebooting it from that new drive?

[Barry]

Nope, nothing to do with Apple Products...happens randomly to any brand of HD.

look here

http://www.pbfixit.com/cart/catalog/index.html

find your model laptop and download the instructions for installation. Do you have Tiger install disks??

[SeattleWRX]

OK, got it reinstalled. Now just need help "erasing" the new hard drive and reinstalling tiger. Any helpful links?

Thanks.

[Barry]

boot from the Tiger Install DVD. instead of running the install, in the utilities menu, run disk utility. One of the choices in disk utility is to erase the hard drive.

[SeattleWRX]

Thanks everyone. I used the extended volume type (Journaled).

I'm in the process if restoring all my data and I'm glad this is over. Hopefully this HD gives me better luck.

[Renatog]

I tried running OS X's disk utility from boot CD but verify/repair failed with error msg:
Invalid node structure
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree
The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired

What can I do?

[Chuckit]

Try DiskWarrior?