11-02-2005, 01:42 AM

Hi,

My powerbook, about 18 months old, has begun freezing and forcing me to manually turn the computer off, after which it won't start up beyond the blue/gray spinny screen.

Initally, I could just run disk repairs from my start-up disk, but now even that isn't working. When this happened last week, I went to my college's computer center and used Disk Warrior, which seems to ameliorate the situation until tonight when it occurred again. As the computer center won't be open until tomorrow morning, I'm trying to think of ways to fix it now. Any suggestions? I have an external hard drive set up as a firewire device, and I've been trying to start up from my external hard drive so that my computer will read from that as opposed to my hard drive. I assumed that it would work since my external hard drive is an exact copy of my computer's internal hard drive, but whenever I start up the computer, depressing the "option" key, my external hard drive won't come up as one of my choices, whereas the internal HD and the start-up disk WILL be options. Why is this happening? What can I do?

Thank you so much.

Best,
Ally

11-02-2005, 06:21 AM

sounds like something big is wrong, just wait till the morning and take it to the store

11-02-2005, 09:22 AM

Bad news, amigo: What you're describing sounds like hard drive failure PLUS logic board failure. If it were just the hard drive, then theoretically the machine could boot from an external disk. But if it's not even doing that, I smell logic board failure.

Same thing happened to me. It sucks. I got Apple to fix it for their flat-rate repair charge (which was a deal considering that the logic board alone is worth at least $300), but it sucked not having my Powerbook for a week and a half.