06-08-2006, 09:43 PM

My powerbook g4 17" just crapped out! The hard drive keeps making this ticking sound now whenever I turn it on. Whenever I put in a bootable CD to reinstall os x it does not even detect the hard drive under volumes. Does anybody have any ideas on where to go from here? Am I screwed and need a new disk? Luckily I have apple care but there is a lot of stuff on my machine that I need!

06-08-2006, 09:48 PM

The hard drive doesn't show up in disk utility during installation either.

06-08-2006, 09:53 PM

Originally Posted by gort

The hard drive doesn't show up in disk utility during installation either.

Grinding clicking noises usually means your drive has died and generally not repairable, especially if it is not even detected in disk manager. Even if the drive is unformatted or the partitions have been lost or corrupted it still shows up there as a hardware device. For several hundred or in some cases thousands of dollars there are places that can recover data. Hopefully you had important stuff backed up somewhere. Now it is possible that a cable has come loose, well not necessarily loose itself but one of the pins has lost contact. Sometimes unplugging and replugging the drive will fix that problem. But if you have applecare, then opening the computer would void that so I would let them have a look. They might be able to recover it. Best of luck!

06-12-2006, 11:28 PM

Well I was contemplating replacing the drive myself, I actually cracked open the machine and had it all laid out looking at it. Then I figured, I paid for applecare I'll let them do it, there are a lot of delicate-looking parts in here.

So I took it to the local shop which is listed on apple.com as an authorized warranty repair center. Luckily they did in fact do the repairs for me free of charge, thank god! The total cost of parts & labor listed was about $300 so it looks like the applecare has already paid off (this is my first time ever using it).

The only bad side is I lost some important documents and stuff, but I had most of my most important stuff on an external hard drive backed up from when I reformatted a month ago.