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10.5 Disk Failure
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Dex13
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Sep 19, 2011, 07:06 PM
 
I attempted to stream (LAN <> WIFI) a .avi via file sharing from my G51.82003 to my PB 1.5 17". it stuttered, sucked a bunch, so I quit vlc. I went upstairs to simply copy the file to my firewire hard drive and then I got a -500 error that it couldn't copy the .avi to my external since parts of it could not be read.
ok.

then I shut down (properly) the G5 since I knew this wasn't going to end well. I restarted and it just began to hang at the blue screen after booting.
i connected it via fw to my pb12" and saw that the permissions were fine and the disc was indeed healthy according to disc utility.
i reinstalled the os and now its seems to be fine.

I went to my laptop this morning to start working and it wouldn't even get past the grey screen, it would just spin the black and white progress circle forever. I connected it via target disc mode to my other pb12" and disc utility says that it cannot be repaired and that I need to pull off everything I should need because its going to die pretty soon.

WTF.

im about to erase it to see if that will resolve my issues but it seems so bizarre to me that this happened coincidentally because of streaming a damn file.

am I nuts or is there something else wrong here?
the hard drive in the G5 is pretty new, its a 2.5 500GB 7200 drive, but the hard drive in the powerbook is stock.

:edit:
after reinstalling the OS with an erase (PB17"), the hard drive seems fine. been duplicating large uncompressed .mov files and it appears to be ok.
( Last edited by Dex13; Sep 19, 2011 at 07:51 PM. )
     
Big Mac
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Sep 19, 2011, 07:12 PM
 
Hard drives are highly sophisticated, sensitive, densely packed mechanical devices. They're usually reliable enough that we're lulled into a false sense of security that they won't fail and are outraged in the event that they do. It's easy to blame whatever you had it doing last, but there's no chance that simply streaming a video file caused it to die. I've been highly tempted to blame Time Machine when two different Time Machine backup drives failed on me over the last couple of years, but a drive shouldn't fail as a result of normal operations.

Incidentally, regarding drive age, I've found that drives a few months old seem to have a higher potential fail rate than drives that have been in service for a year or more.

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
     
Dex13  (op)
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Sep 19, 2011, 07:52 PM
 
yeah. i guess im just jumping to conclusions, but it was the very last thing that I did on either computer, its never happened to me ever before and both the G5 and PB have been utter champs in the past. It also seems now that the hard drive isn't failing in the PB but only time will tell if that is true or not.
     
apple4ever
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Sep 21, 2011, 01:59 PM
 
Can you do this:

Put the iMac in Target Disk Mode.

Connect to PB.

Boot up the PB, hold down option, and choose the iMac's drive.

Download and run this: http://cloudfront.volitans-software....tility302B.zip

What does it say?

It checks the internal HD's diagnostics and will let you know if there is a problem.

You can run internal tests too.
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Waragainstsleep
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Sep 21, 2011, 03:41 PM
 
I've had drives report failure and go on for years. I've had them fail utterly only to pick them up again and reuse them years later and gotten more years use out of them. Also had them fail out of the box.
I have plenty of more important things to do, if only I could bring myself to do them....
     
steve626
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Sep 21, 2011, 04:22 PM
 
Originally Posted by Dex13 View Post
yeah. i guess im just jumping to conclusions, but it was the very last thing that I did on either computer, its never happened to me ever before and both the G5 and PB have been utter champs in the past. It also seems now that the hard drive isn't failing in the PB but only time will tell if that is true or not.
Given that all hard drives will, eventually, fail sometime, you'll be doing SOMETHING with the device when it eventually fails. But that does not mean there is a cause/effect relationship between what you were doing (streaming a file, copying a file, etc.) and the failure. People often mistakenly "blame" the event that was happening with "causing" the failure. The failure is typically due to moving parts wearing out or something with the platters. The drive can fail while the computer is asleep, or when it next spins up after being shut down, or during any of many normally harmless activities (renaming a file, moving a file, deleting a file, streaming a video, whatever).
iMac Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz, 4 Gig RAM, 10.6.8
Macbook Pro Retina Display 15", 16 GB RAM, 10.7.4
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