The background: I'm troubleshooting a friend's 12" PB G4. When he brought it to me, he said the hard drive was making funny noises. I booted to an external drive and ran some tests on it. It wouldn't mount, yet passed the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics. Tech Tool results:
1. Disk Controller test went slowly, but passed.
2. Read Write went very slowly, but passed.
3. S.M.A.R.T. passed.
4. Surface scan immediately showed bad block after bad block until finally it gave up after 41 bad blocks. Seemed that every block it checked was bad and then it just stopped, having barely made progress in the progress bar.
So it seemed to me obvious that the hard drive was dying. The computer passed every other test in TTP. So I replaced the hard drive with a brand new drive and the replacement went as smooth as possible - I've done a fair number of these and this one was relatively easy.
I booted right up to the Leopard disk and opened Disk Utility to format the drive. However, disk utility gave me an Input/Output error and the format failed. So I booted back up to my external drive (10.4.9) and the same error happened in DU.
I ran TTP again and interestingly, the same results happened with the new drive as with the old - passed Disk Controller and Read Write (very slow) and when I ran a surface scan, it immediately started showing bad blocks.
I put the drive I pulled into an enclosure and interestingly, it mounted immediately and passed all tests, including the surface scan.
So I'm guessing the problem is the hard drive cable - I think I remember that it's not unheard of for a cable to go bad spontaneously. What do you think? Is that likely or could it be the logic board? The computer boots fine to an external drive, so if it's the logic board, it seems that it's only the hard drive bus.
I think I've been pretty thorough, but any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Best,
Adam
1. Disk Controller test went slowly, but passed.
2. Read Write went very slowly, but passed.
3. S.M.A.R.T. passed.
4. Surface scan immediately showed bad block after bad block until finally it gave up after 41 bad blocks. Seemed that every block it checked was bad and then it just stopped, having barely made progress in the progress bar.
So it seemed to me obvious that the hard drive was dying. The computer passed every other test in TTP. So I replaced the hard drive with a brand new drive and the replacement went as smooth as possible - I've done a fair number of these and this one was relatively easy.
I booted right up to the Leopard disk and opened Disk Utility to format the drive. However, disk utility gave me an Input/Output error and the format failed. So I booted back up to my external drive (10.4.9) and the same error happened in DU.
I ran TTP again and interestingly, the same results happened with the new drive as with the old - passed Disk Controller and Read Write (very slow) and when I ran a surface scan, it immediately started showing bad blocks.
I put the drive I pulled into an enclosure and interestingly, it mounted immediately and passed all tests, including the surface scan.
So I'm guessing the problem is the hard drive cable - I think I remember that it's not unheard of for a cable to go bad spontaneously. What do you think? Is that likely or could it be the logic board? The computer boots fine to an external drive, so if it's the logic board, it seems that it's only the hard drive bus.
I think I've been pretty thorough, but any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Best,
Adam