major hard drive issues

R

retroshark

Registered
i recently bought a powerbook g4, the newest model with the 1.67ghz processor etc.. anyways, the other day i was working on it and a small stone figure fell from my shelf onto the case, right under the left speaker where i think the hard drive is located. now, this may be a complete coincidence, but since then, ituned has been lockign up on certain songs, some of which i have written down and tested in other programs and gotten the same result.

the falling object made a small dent (ill post pictures if nessacary) and i think it may be the cause of my problems.

its obvious the drive is screwed because when the song skips, you cna hear the drive making noises while trying to read the sectors. it would be fine if it was one or two songs, but its more then that, ive counted about 15 instances on diffeerent songs. as well as that, i was listening to one song, and it started to freeze itunes and finder locked up. then the drive started screaming and the read/write heads sounded as if they were clunking against the case. not pleasant... anyone have any ideas? ive runa full hardware test from the osx cd, and im considering backing up my data on an external HDD and then reformatting. please help me!


EDIT: ok, so ive backed up my data onto my ipod, and ive been rewriting over the drive with 0's using the disk utility on the OS install CD. everyting is fine until the progress bar gets to about 10%, then suddenly the drive starts franticly clicking and the read/write haeds clunk against the side of the drive enclosure. this cant be good.
 
How old is it? Is it still under warranty or AppleCare? I say this because it sounds like the hard drive was damaged.
 
well its the lates model, about a month old, maybe less. anwyay, i was told that if in fact it was the thing that fell on it that caused that damage, then the whole disk would have been damaged, but it was just a tiny sector that grew and grew the more i used the coputer.
 
Satcomer said:
How old is it? Is it still under warranty or AppleCare? I say this because it sounds like the hard drive was damaged.
Click to expand...

first sentence of his post:
"i recently bought a powerbook g4, the newest model with the 1.67ghz processor etc.."

anyway.. sounds like it is damaged and worst case scenario is 150-200 for a new hd. apple won't cover user error in most situations.
 
retroshark said:
well its the lates model, about a month old, maybe less. anwyay, i was told that if in fact it was the thing that fell on it that caused that damage, then the whole disk would have been damaged, but it was just a tiny sector that grew and grew the more i used the coputer.
Click to expand...

It won't always kill the whole drive. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen that outcome from a sharp blow, personally. What happens is the drive has a "head crash". The shock of the object made the read head slam against the platter surface in the drive, causing small localized damage to the platter. Unfortunately I've not found any way of getting OS X to remap around these bad blocks very gracefully. When it happened to my old iBook, I had to just suck it up and invoke Applecare.

Frankly it's kind of amazing that the damage is usually so minimal. Consider these numbers: (http://www.ua-local13.org/training/INTRO/intro3.htm)

To give the reader a sense of scale to the minute distances consider the following; If we magnified the head gap of 5 millionths of an inch to be 1"(200000X) and all other aspects equally;
The read and write head would be 1300 ft long by 300 ft high (the size of the sears tower on its side).
The disk would be traveling over 10 million MPH. (170,000 M/Sec) at a distance of 1" above the ground.
Each data bit would be spaced 3 ¾ inches apart.
Each track would be spaced 5 ½ feet apart.
Track changes side to side would move at a rate of 420,000 MPH.
With the Earth being 24,900 miles in circumference. It would take 8 seconds to circle it.
Click to expand...
 
my harddrive on my ibook is clicking (no didn't have anything drop on it) and i've given up on it and using a firewire drive. Problem is, when i wake up from sleep, the ibook seems to rescan and pick up the local harddrive and proceed to incessant clicking and almost freezing up the system.

Is there anyway I can disable the internal hard drive (OS isn't allowing me to umount)? openboot prompt? I don't care to pay Apple Store 80 bucks and I hear it's almost taking apart the whole laptop to reach inside and take the drive out....
 
Hmm... Try using Disk Utility to blow away the partitions on the drive. From the Erase tab, you should be able to use the Options button to configure partitions.
 
cowboylin:
try this.. open disk util. select the drive and click the erase tab. click options and select "zero all data" it will take a while but it may be worth it.
 
You need to boot from the supplied OS X restore discs and run Disk Utility from there. Running Disk Utility from the hard drive isn't going to work, as you've just found out.
 
So much for the new PowerBook's Sudden Motion Sensor drive parking, huh? A blow to the top of the machine should have caused the drive to park, I would think. Maybe Apple will replace the HD since the computer is only a month old.
You might not want to volunteer that your statue fell on it, though.
 
Sudden motion sensor isn't a miracle cure for blows. The blow causes a dent in his/her Powerbook. That would have hammered the hard drive itself. That will kill the hard drive, even if it was parked.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top