need hard drive help!! :(

[expergo]

hi,

i have a year and a half ibook g4. yesterday when i turned it on...it made weird noises...grinding...clicking...etc. i knew it was the hard drive. so i tried to backup everything. i turned the ibook on the side and that made the noise go away and made it a little usable so i could backup. done.

but now the hard drive still makes the noise no matter what and is superbly slow. SMART status is verified though. but it's totally not usable. so i have osx on an fw drive and i can boot off that for now, but the internal hard drive is still connected and tries to run. so everytime i get into finder or anything that remotely reads the internal, it just slows to a crawl and hangs. is there any way to disable the internal hard drive from being used?

i know in windows i could jsut right click on the device in device manager and disable...so is there something like that in osx?

thanks!

 

[MacsRgr8]

If you're booted from the external HD, you could eject the internal HD by dragging it to the trash.
Maybe that'll help a bit.

 

[TLRedhawke]

I find that the best way to disable a hard drive is to remove it altogether. If the internal drive is dead, and the machine is out of warranty, just pull it altogether, and replace it with a new one.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Getting inside the iBook is a pain, though.

If you have managed to back everything up, boot from the external drive (reinstall an OS if you have to, to make it bootable) and use Disk Utility ro erase the internal drive. If you don't partition it, it won't exist. If you can.t do that, perhaps you can define a small partition, and leave the bulk of the drive as unallocated space. Either way it should prevent the Finder from slowing down, until you can get the drive replaced.

 

[expergo]

hah...thanks all.

so i coudn't stand it so i took the ibook apart. it took me an hour and a bit with my sisters help.

here.. http://pneumatos-online.com/ibook/

i followed ifixit.com and it was very helpful. a few things were tough to do but everything was done and nothing damaged at all! well not yet. i still have to put it together after i buy my hd tmrw. but i labelled everything so it should be fine.

ask me if you need any help taking it apart. i would sooo take one apart for like $40. haha. anyways...........

 

[TLRedhawke]

Once you've done them a few times, they're really not so bad. The G3 versions, and all 14" models have some silly little quirks that you just need to get used to, though. It's usually about an hour's worth of labour to take the whole thing apart, and put it back together. My going rate is usually $80 for that