Diagnosing powerbook problem

Hi, just wondering if anyone could give me some diagnostic tips with a very unhappy powerbook. I’ve tried the Apple support pages, but they didn’t do the job so I thought I’d look for some helpful experts – I will be immensely grateful if you could help me figure out what’s wrong.

It’s a G4 Power book, running OS 10.4. It suddenly froze on me one day, so I held down the power button to reboot and it hasn’t worked since. One thing that I guess could be relevant is that it was pretty much out of disc space – it had flashed up the warning a few times in recent days and I was in progress of doing a clean up when it went.

What I’ve tried so far:

Normal power up:
Result: Chime, apple logo and spinning logo appear. Stays that way for 4 mins, until screen goes darker grey and “You need to restart your computer. Hold down the power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.” message appears.

Safe boot (with progress status) – power up holding shift-command-v:
Result: Chime, apple logo appears, nothing else. Stays like this for ~30 mins until I give up and power down.

Reseting PRAM and NVRAM – power up holding command-option-p-r
Result: Chime, then restarts and second chime, then does exactly the same as the normal power up.

Next step recommended by the Apple Support site is to start directly from the OSX installation disc – but my powerbook already has a CD inserted which I am unable to eject.

Any tips – how can I eject? Could the safe reboot take more than 30 mins (bearing in mind it didn’t give me any progress indication)? Anything else I should try?

Cheers
GibRib

To eject the disk...reboot the computer...hold down the trackpad button while it reboots. This should eject the disk.

Then boot from your Mac OS install CD/DVD to see if that works. If it does your computer is probably fine.

Don't let your hard drive get so full...that's what those warnings are for.

Hope this helps,

- Nick

Thanks Nick, disc ejected and I'm rebooting from the OS CD. Will let you know how I go (probably tomorrow)

GR

GibRib said:

Thanks Nick, disc ejected and I'm rebooting from the OS CD. Will let you know how I go (probably tomorrow)

GR

Click to expand...

Awesome!!! Glad you got the disk ejected...and I look forward to seeing how booting with the OS CD/DVD works out.

- Nick

A little confused again...

The Apple support instructions say:
# Start up your Mac while holding the C key to start from the disc.
# Once started from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Utility menu.
# In Disk Utility, perform a disk repair of your Mac OS X volume;

When it says start from the disc, does it mean reinstall the OS? Because that's the only option it's offering me. Or is there some way to access Disk Utility without reinstalling?

And when I try to do that, it says I have 1.6GB free, but 1.9GB required.

Edit: just realised the disk utility option is available, don't notice the menu at the top :Blushing:

And I've tried running a repair, but got the following error:

The volume Hardrive could not be repaired.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

1HFS volume checked
Repair attempted on 1 volume

Starting to get a bit worried now...

(Edit: that last line was me, not disk utility)

It is very possible that the hard drive is dead (that's why Disk Utility couldn't repair it)...this sort of thing happens eventually. Hopefully you had any important files backed up.

- Nick

Yep the drive is a dead goose and time for either a new drive or an updated machine. Utility such as DiskWarrior may save the drive, but at US$99 probably cheaper to just bite the bullet and pop in a larger hard drive.

Yuk. Last back up was a little while ago, not catastrophic but probably a bunch of photos that I'd be sad to lose.

Any idea whether Mac repair shops might carry Discwarrior and have a crack at recovering the data?

GibRib said:

Any idea whether Mac repair shops might carry Discwarrior and have a crack at recovering the data?

Click to expand...

If you feel DiskWarrior can recover your files..why not purchase & do the recovery yourself?

Also be aware that many times when a hard drive "dies" the mechanical parts are what fail. A software program cannot recover data from a hard drive when the mechanical components have failed.

This is where you get into professional data recovery services. I don't know what this costs these days...but the last time I checked...this sort of thing could cost over $1000. Sounds to me your files weren't that important.

Just buy & install a new hard drive...and back up more frequently.

- NIck