12" PB and Hard Disk problem woes...

Hello,

I am not having a lot of luck with the 12" Powerbook I bought 2 weeks ago, as such I am typing this on a Dell laptop which is ugh, and I am in fact waiting to sell, but with the PowerBook being less than dependable, that is on hold for now.

I work in an AppleCentre here in the UK, I am very Mac literate and used them for nigh on 10 years so I am not devoid of experience.

My PB is the combo model, 1.5GHz and 60gig 5400rpm drive.

Since this week, it has failed on me twice. On Wednesday I booted it and it got to the Finder, spinning beachball, nothing. Command+Option+Esc to force quit, nothing. Had to forcibly shut it down (power button held in) and then back on. Got the startup sound and the grey apple logo screen with spinning dial.

It would do this for longer than usual and then the PB would shut down. Booting the OS X disc and trying to repair via Disk Utility failed Error it could not repair. So I was forced to reformat zeroing all blocks, but the reinstalls didn't work, until I took it to our technical dept. they did nothing different to me when installing it, and it somehow worked. Odd considering I did 4-5 failed reinstalls with all manner of options. (I run it or did with jusr HFS+ no journaling)

So, all was well till tonight. In iTunes 5 and went to use a menu, it jammed, sound stopped and nothing, sound resumed, mouse pointer moving but everyhing else jammed, could not call up force quit. So force power down again, with power held in, turn back on. Mac startup chime rings in, grey skin apple screen with spinning dial.

Guess what? Switches itself off after a while.

Boot OS X 10.4 disc, Disk Utility, the Macinitosh HD partition is not even mounted, try a repair, it fails. Cannot repair it, no matter how many times I try

I am seriously peeved as you can imagine! I do not wish to reinstall as I am quite fedup now, and wish to replicate the issue tomorrow at our technical services dept. AFAIC, it's either a duff hard drive (though SMART reports verified) or a disk controller issue maybe.

Any ideas also from here would be much appreciated as I have already had to delay some freelance illustration projects due today till Monday due to this week's errors and I cannot afford the loss of time I am now experiencing again and to be without my Mac for too much longer.

Any ideas on what could cause this would be appreciated. I will let you know what happens down at technical too tomorrow.

Thanks everybody so much! :flower:

Vicky

Sounds like the Hard Drive is no good to me... can't boot and can't/won't install indicates that it can't find the device to install to.

Personally I'd replace the HD, but first double check the seatings of all the connections to the HD and the motherboard.

Good luck!

Well, one thing I forgot to do was to do command + s on boot; (boot to single user mode) and use fsck.

That checked out OK to start with,but came up with b link errors or something, still it booted into 10.4.2.

I was still sceptical that it would happen again I mean on any OS X Mac I have used or had, never had to fsck, or indeed do a hard disk repair via disk utility - hence why I love Macs, since first getting my IIfx in 1995; I know how reliable Macs have been to me and I know when one is poorly (bring back the sad mac boot screen!! :flower: ) And this one clearly is as well, I just know.

So technical have taken it to assure the drive is dud or like that, which they say b links or whatever the HFS+ error was are indicative of a bad drive; to have it sent to Apple for repair/replacement.

In the meantime I am without my PowerBook at home and bar Basilisk on this Dell; I'm without a Mac at home and man does it suck! Just as well I get to use Macs every day at work to restore sanity.

(In all truthfulness, Windows 2000/XP hasn't been unreliable to me, it's just dull, boring, uninspiring and I spend most of my time waiting for spyware scans to stop... Just one week of this...)

Thx again!!

Vicky