ibook HD problem

[chiras]

Hi there,

 

 

I have a serious problem with my iBook G4 (approx. 4 years old) running Tiger. After the latest system update I was not able to reboot my sytem, not even in single user mode. I was able to recover my files on the HD using my osx86 machine in target drive mode. After this the HD seemed to crash totaly. Even after erasing the drive Tiger setup told me I am not able to install on this drive. I was able to reinstall OSX (Tiger) on a firewire drive, so the system is up again and running, but there are still some probs.

 

With this drive I am not able to install software, because the Installers always stuck at the selection of the install drive. Additionally the shutdown often fails because the drives cannot be shut. And I would prefer not always taking the firewire drive with me, so putting OSX back on the internal drive.

 

When I erase the drive in HFS+ (journaled and unjournal) the drive is listed red in the HD util. Using the FAT format it is not listed red and even sometimes mountable. However the greatest difference is that with HFS+ the SMART status failed, when using FAT it is disabled. I am quite sure that SMART is not supported by my drive (TOSHIBA MK4025GAS), because in my previous system it was always listed as not supported. The install disk of 10.3 tells me the drive has no SMART (no matter which format), but the 10.4 install disk claims SMART failed. Very strange is that after erasing or partitioning the drive (with diskutility and terminal) often previous names of the drive reappear and repairing the drive brings up sometimes errors with the "Parition Map". How is this possible? When erasing or partitioning the drives, it seems there is still some information left on the drive.

 

I think my drive and tiger are not working together as they should. Is there any possibility to disable the SMART check for this drive? It is obvious that SMART is failing when it is not supported by my drive. How to erase or partition the drive and get all of the information of the drive, so I can reinstall from the scratch? I do not think the drive is really broken, because when it was mountable in FAT I was able to use it without any problems.

 

 

Thanks for any suggestions,

chi

[erbic]

I think the drive's dying. Although you say SMART isn't supported by your drive, most of the stuff in your post points to a dead/dying drive.

 

You'd be best off buying another HDD, and you can use this as an excuse to get a bigger one. HDDs are dirt cheap, even 2.5" laptop drives.