G3 - Hard drive spins up repeatedly, strange

I have been a PC person until recently and am trying to learn more about mac's. Someone gave my an iBook, I think it's the 12.1" 700 MHz with 2 USB ports. It had a failing hard drive, it was a 20 gig drive running OS9. The drive was failing but the computer still booted from it.

I pulled the drive and put in a 20 gig drive from an IBM thinkpad. The drive spins up over and over, like the spinup process restarts every second or so when I try to let the computer boot from the drive (I restored an image of the bad drive to this 20 gig drive).

VRRRMMM,VRRRMMM,VRRRMMM, etc

But I can boot from a Discwarrior CD and the hard drive spins up fine and I can access it from being booted off the CD.

It only does that weird spinup thing when I try to boot from the drive.

I tested the drive with 2 passes of the IBM hard drive utility Advanced test on a PC before putting it in the ibook.

I thought there might be a trick to it because I have an iMac indigo doing a similar thing. I pulled it's 4 gig drive and put in a used and tested 20 gig drive but the drive goes click-click-click like a bad drive when it's in the mac but if I boot from a CD it works and is accessible plus it tests fine on PC's.

I give up, need advice. Thanks.

is the drive close to full????

i do know a drive sometimes needs to spin a few times during startup, maybe you have a loud drive? or does it keep doing it after the startup process is done?
-chris

coach_z said:

is the drive close to full????

i do know a drive sometimes needs to spin a few times during startup, maybe you have a loud drive? or does it keep doing it after the startup process is done?
-chris

Click to expand...

No, the drive goes clunka clunka clunka (like a failing hard drive) non stop until I turn off the computer. If I pull the drive and hook it to an iMac 333 MHz it boots right up off of it no problems no strange noises.