iBook 14" G3 800 hard drive has died

[aldo]

Hello all,

Was noticing some oddness with my ibook over the last few days. It'd freeze up and come with the 'disk space low - please close some applications or free up hard drive space' warning once or twice. I thought this was odd because I had over 11GB of free space (plus 640MB RAM in it).

This morning it was much more dire, every 3 minutes it'd freeze up with this screen and take more than 5 to recover. It was basically unusable.

I managed to get activity monitor open and it had 4GB of virtual RAM used. I thought something had went wrong with the virtual memory subroutines and it was going over a file size limit, causing major problems. I thought the good old restart trick would work.

Before that however I tried to get into system profiler to see the SMART status of the HDD and it was obvious that something wasn't right at all - it wasn't coming up with the disk space warning, just sittin there for minutes at a time, and then having a second or two of hard drive accessing before sitting there again.

I restarted it, and it's taken over 1 hour to start up again, with the '3 minutes nothing, 2 seconds reading' routine. The hard drive is making a noise like it's reading a file, failing, reading it again, failing etc until eventually it manages to read it and move on.

The iBook is made in 2002 and it's under the logic board replacement program apart from it doesn't show any of the issues that it should to 'qualify' for it.

Any ideas? I'm not going to get applecare, because it's way too expensive (?200!). I could attempt to replace it myself but it does look quite involved and I'd rather not risk it. Any chance apple would repair it as an 'act of goodwill'?

[aldo]

Apple isn't going to be reparing it certainly, and the nearest 'apple authorised support centre' is over 60 miles away from me and they will charge a ****load to repair the harddrive.

The main problem is that I have about ?300 worth of batteries, RAM, and airport stuff that I'll need to replace if i got a new ibook, so that's out of the picture.

I'm currently installing OSX again and it seems to be working, as in the hard drive is constantly accessing and the progress bar is moving fine. Maybe I'll be granted a miricle and it was just a b0rked install of OSX or something that's killed it.

[dt]

Good luck... :/

[aldo]

test

[dougal.s]

You get it to work dude?

If you physically have to replace the drive yourself it is a bit of a guddle, but a lot cheaper than getting apple to do it!!

Dougal.

[asdflkjsdrhthfhrhr]

Aw, that's tough, man. My sympathies.

One of my friend's iBook had this problem. It was sad to see it go.

[jamend]

Are you sure it's a failing hard-drive? The freezing, hard-drive, and unreseponsive SMART analysis would make it seem so but the 4 GB of used swap would suggest that all of those symptons are caused by a software issue. It could be that you have a buggy piece of sofware and that it has a memory leak or something like that which is causing heavy RAM/swap usage and consequently lots of hard-disk activity which could be causing the lock-ups and poor hard-disk performance.

[PureEdit]

Its not that hard to replace, I did it for a friend once. The new drive will not be to expensive and should be larger then what you had before.

[aldo]

You get it to work dude?

If you physically have to replace the drive yourself it is a bit of a guddle, but a lot cheaper than getting apple to do it!!

Dougal.

585345430[/snapback]

Yes, in the end it did turn out to be an OSX problem. Wierdest one I've ever seen though.

[kyro]

^ finally.. u outofwoods :p.... now have a nice day.

[dougal.s]

Nice one! Strange error that one, not heard of many critical failures of OS X.

Dougal.

[kawai]

Nice one! Strange error that one, not heard of many critical failures of OS X.

Dougal.

585347799[/snapback]

ever tried to install final version of 10.3.x updates from a beta?

i konw i know, but don't ever try to do that, OS X won't even boot if you do that.

[dougal.s]

Haha!! That is why a full install is the order of the day when a new OS appears!

Dougal.

[aldo]

<rant>

Guess what. It's ****** again. Yay. Same error, 'out of disk space', when I have 13.3GB on a 27GB drive left.

Apple won't even help me work out if this is a hardware or software fault. I'm guessing it's hardware, but frankly I just can't be arsed.

I mean, ok, I can understand them not covering the hard drive fault. But for a 'premium product' it's a joke, I wonder if you'd get the same service off them if you bought a ?2500 Powermac (no sir, I can't help you fix it. But why don't you buy a brand new one!).

Basically, it sucks. Especially when they offer such a short warranty. I don't know of any 'sell-to-public' computer company that offers a 1yr warranty these days, not to mention Apple only offers 90 days of tech support.

</rant>

Edit: ok, I calmed down. Something is majorly wrong here, the dock is using up 1.7GB of VM. And Apple has the cheek to call Microsoft software bloated!

[aldo]

Jesus, I don't know what the hell is going on here. iCalAlarmScheduler using 150MB of VM, and 15MB (!) of physical memory. I don't even use iCal.

I've also got 400MB worth of Apache processes. So much for trusting OSX to handle all this sort of stuff. Another 50MB of VM used up with the 'bugreporter' tool (5MB real ram).

How Apple plans to sell Mac Mini's with 256MB of RAM and expect them to perform decently is beyond me. OSX is the worlds most bloated operating system.

[Martog]

Basically, it sucks. Especially when they offer such a short warranty. I don't know of any 'sell-to-public' computer company that offers a 1yr warranty these days, not to mention Apple only offers 90 days of tech support.

585380955[/snapback]

A lot of computer are sold though with one year warrenties, and they aren't apples. Most of your computers that a lot of people buy from places like walmart carry only a one year warrenty with them...now places like Dell that you order online from are different, but if a person can just walk into walmart and buy a computer, they will do it.

[aldo]

A lot of computer are sold though with one year warrenties, and they aren't apples.  Most of your computers that a lot of people buy from places like walmart carry only a one year warrenty with them...now places like Dell that you order online from are different, but if a person can just walk into walmart and buy a computer, they will do it.

585381365[/snapback]

But Walmart computers are much, much cheaper than Apple's computers. I wouldn't buy a computer from walmart, but my point stands: for a supposed 'premium' pricepoint, 1yr warranty isn't enough.

Anyone got any ideas here? It's totally died this evening, won't even boot up. I haven't got the time to keep reinstalling OSX plus all the software updates ever 2 weeks.

Does anyone know what a cause of this could be? I don't want to take the sucker apart and replace the hDD to find out it is a logic board problem.

[ZenPirate]

Here's what I would do. Buy an external firewire enclosed hard drive, install OS X on it and use that as you boot drive. May not be the prettiest solution, but it works. You'll also get a performance boost if you get a faster drive than the iBooks 4200rpm drive.

[aldo]

Yea, I've thought of that. I don't know if it'll work though, because I'm not convinced there is any problem with the HDD. And it would also mean I couldn't use my laptop as a laptop.. which would be a _slight_ problem :). But if it meant having a working laptop vs not, I'd take it.

I just reinstalled OSX again, and all is fine. This is what makes me confused. If the HDD was dying I wouldn't expect it to go for 10-14days+ and then die again. (I have turned it off in this time, so it's unlikely to be heat).

[RiverCampher]

A few suggestions for you. (I work for apple btw).

1) Run Open Disk Utility from the install disk 1 (Installer menu screen after u select the language). Does it show errors that it can't recover from?

2) Are you erase and installing or archive and installing Mac OS X? Big difference if disk utility says there are errors that cannot be fixed, sometimes a clean format does the trick.

3) Run Apple Hardware Test (the disk you got with your powerbook) by inserting the CD and holding the ALT button down and then clicking on the forward arrow. Run the extended test to see if any hardware faults are detected.

Good Luck!

[aldo]

Ok, about a week after this thread it was obvious that the logic board was at fault - faulty display etc. I sent it into Apple and all was fixed, got it back 3 days or so after. Wonderful I thought. Obviously the bad logic board was causing all sorts of issues, including busting the ATA controller.

Now today (about 2-3months after this thread was made), EXACT SAME ISSUES!

I bet in about 3 days time it'll fail to boot up. A couple days after that it'll start showing a scrambled display.

This is, in a word, pathetic. Less than 3 months after a so-called 'logic board repair', it's showing the exact same issues. Obviously what Apple is doing here is a cost-benefit ratio and working out that it's cheaper to throw bad logic boards back in than actually design a new one, get it milled, assemble it. So millions(?) probably are going to be seriously inconviencied because it's not worth producing a working product by Apple.

Is it possible I could get a replacement iBook G4 (or basically, one that doesn't have this design problem?) instead? If it's going to be useless if have to lose a good few weeks of productivity every couple of months while I wait for the issue to arise as on the website, get it repaired, restore backups etc.

Frankly this is ****ty. Don't buy a used iBook G3. They will break, and if you're lucky you'll get a warranty replacement.

[aldo]

Ok, I just ran the Apple Hardware Test (just found the CD today -- so haven't run it before) and when I run it I get all sorts of colors and distortion, similar to the ones I had when my iBook totally failed coming up on the screen. Is this normal? It passes the VRAM and all other tests, but I'm guessing it wouldn't know if it was outputing crap, and it's still passing it.

So my super-simple question is: When I run the Extended Hardware Test, should my display go off the 'progress bar' screen at all?

[xodlike]

Argh! I feel you're pain.

I've had more than my fair share of iBook G4 problems, and it doesn't seem like mnuch will get better.

I'm really sorry, you should just hope for the best, I guess.