Chasinspace
Registered
Hi All.
I've been having some trouble lately when I start-up my G4 Powerbook. I'll try to be as detailed as possible, but tis may make for a rather long post, so please bare with me. First off, as I said it's a G4 Powerbook, running OSX 10.3.9 with a 1.33 GHz processor, 768MB RAM, and an 80GB hard drive. Recently, while running normally, the computer had started to make a very loud clicking/clunking sound, that to my ears sounds like its' comming from the Hard Drive. Shortly after that when starting-up various odd behaviors were observed: sometimes there would be no Chime on start-up but otherwise everything went well, alternately the machine would 'Boot' to a blank grey screen and remain that way indefinately, still at other times It would chime, the Apple logo would appear and the 'circular' bars would appear, but then nothing would happen, it just stayed that way with the 'circular bars' continuing to pulse in sequence. All the while the HD would be clunking away.
So I called Apple to see if my Apple Care was still valid and it is so I booked an appointment at the Genius Desk of the nearest Apple Store, and my wife took it in (I had to work). When she described the problems to the guy behind the counter he said that a clikcking sound such as described, usually indicated immenant failure of the Hard Drive and we should back up to an external HD ASAP. After this he preformed a 'diagnostic' on the machine afterwhich he said that everything checked out O.K. and there was no problem with the HD. After this he told her (now I can't remember the exact terms here ) that we should do some kind of system restore with the disks and that should solve the problem.
So my wife bought an external HD and everything is backed-up (which is someting we had been planning to do anyway) and we plan on updating to 10.4.(whatever) - the most recent O.S. But the reason I'm writing this here is because I'm not convinced that a software restore/upgrade will remedy, what to me sounds like a physical problem (Hard Dscs shouldn't go "plunk-plunk") Now My Apple Care expires in September and the last thing I want is for this Hard Drive to die just after the Apple Care runs out.
And to top it all off it happened again - just before I managed to get it running and loged on here, infact; except this time what happened was a couple of times I got the clicking/clunking and the gery screen and then After another attempt eveything seemed to go fine: Apple logo circular bars, but then instead of the blue start-up screen, I got a black screen with what could only be the 'Root' command (which Iv'e never actually seen before)
So what gives? Is this simply a case of a corrupted OS and a restore/upgrade should solve everything. Or does it sound like there are hard ware issues here? Would it be best to try and get it to the Genius Desk when it is making the clicking/clunking noise?
I've been having some trouble lately when I start-up my G4 Powerbook. I'll try to be as detailed as possible, but tis may make for a rather long post, so please bare with me. First off, as I said it's a G4 Powerbook, running OSX 10.3.9 with a 1.33 GHz processor, 768MB RAM, and an 80GB hard drive. Recently, while running normally, the computer had started to make a very loud clicking/clunking sound, that to my ears sounds like its' comming from the Hard Drive. Shortly after that when starting-up various odd behaviors were observed: sometimes there would be no Chime on start-up but otherwise everything went well, alternately the machine would 'Boot' to a blank grey screen and remain that way indefinately, still at other times It would chime, the Apple logo would appear and the 'circular' bars would appear, but then nothing would happen, it just stayed that way with the 'circular bars' continuing to pulse in sequence. All the while the HD would be clunking away.
So I called Apple to see if my Apple Care was still valid and it is so I booked an appointment at the Genius Desk of the nearest Apple Store, and my wife took it in (I had to work). When she described the problems to the guy behind the counter he said that a clikcking sound such as described, usually indicated immenant failure of the Hard Drive and we should back up to an external HD ASAP. After this he preformed a 'diagnostic' on the machine afterwhich he said that everything checked out O.K. and there was no problem with the HD. After this he told her (now I can't remember the exact terms here ) that we should do some kind of system restore with the disks and that should solve the problem.
So my wife bought an external HD and everything is backed-up (which is someting we had been planning to do anyway) and we plan on updating to 10.4.(whatever) - the most recent O.S. But the reason I'm writing this here is because I'm not convinced that a software restore/upgrade will remedy, what to me sounds like a physical problem (Hard Dscs shouldn't go "plunk-plunk") Now My Apple Care expires in September and the last thing I want is for this Hard Drive to die just after the Apple Care runs out.
And to top it all off it happened again - just before I managed to get it running and loged on here, infact; except this time what happened was a couple of times I got the clicking/clunking and the gery screen and then After another attempt eveything seemed to go fine: Apple logo circular bars, but then instead of the blue start-up screen, I got a black screen with what could only be the 'Root' command (which Iv'e never actually seen before)
So what gives? Is this simply a case of a corrupted OS and a restore/upgrade should solve everything. Or does it sound like there are hard ware issues here? Would it be best to try and get it to the Genius Desk when it is making the clicking/clunking noise?
