iBook disk playing up

markpatterson

markpatterson

Registered
In the last day or so things have been a bit strange. I normally leave the ibook running folding@home all night and in the morning just have to hit one key to get it active again. But yesterday I had to reboot. I saw the default screensaver, but it was frozen, so I rebooted. Since then after a certain amount of use I can hear the haddisk start clicking away. I clicked on the Fire icon and it froze in the dock, but eventually ran. The clicking noise has carried on even when I've closed the lid to put it to sleep. It was in a state where I could click on things but nothing responded. So it's like having win 98 - you have to reboot a lot.

Any ideas? I'm thinking I may have to back everything up - GB of music and movies and so - and reformat the 30 GB drive, reintall jaguar etc.

I hope this is fixable.
 
Check the console logs around the time of the crash. It is most likely a program you are running, such as Folding@Home, that is causing the freeze.

You can find the Console in /Applications/Utilities. Browse through to the time of the freeze and see if you can spot anything that might describe what the system was doing at that time.

Oh, and backup. Seriously. It doesn't matter how good your computer is, if you don't back up your data you will eventually lose it. Computer hard disks have a 2% chance of failure in any given year. Computers get damaged or stolen, surged, rained on, or introduced to coffee in a rather terminal way ...

I repeat, don't back up just when you need to reinstall. Back up whenever you have data you don't want to lose.
 
I've stopped using floding@home for a few days to see if that could be the problem. But I've been having strange crashes for a while, and stopped f@h for a while to have less going on, but the crashes continued. This may be a continuation of the same underlying problem.

What happens with bad sectors under HFS+ on jaguar? I sort of feel that it is a hardware problem, and that the OS is doing its best to deal with it.

You're right about backing up. Email, the collentions in iphoto, home movies - that requires a heap of space. Maybe I should get a 120 GB martian.
 
Run fsck

To run fsck, you first need to start up your Mac in single-user mode. Here's how:

1. Restart your Mac.

2. Immediately press and hold the Command and "S" keys.

You'll see a bunch of text begin scrolling on your screen. In a few more seconds, you'll see the Unix command line prompt (#).

You're now in single-user mode.

Now that you're at the # prompt, here's how to run fsck:

1. Type: "fsck -y" (that's fsck-space-minus-y).

2. Press Return.

The fsck utility will blast some text onto your screen. If there's damage to your disk, you'll see a message that says:

***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

If you see this message--and this is extremely important--repeat Steps 1 and 2 again and again until that message no longer appears. It is normal to have to run fsck more than once -- the first run's repairs often uncover additional problems..
 
Thanks for that info on running fsck. Maybe that would have done it.

But in sunday evening the machine froze, as it had been doing, and when I tried to restart it didn't get all the way through the login. Fortunately it's still under warranty.
 
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