Maxtor 60G about to die? (was Re: [G4] re: my hard drive western dig vs maxtor?

[Al Poulin]

byen, things look pretty pad for your hard drive.  Have you run any 
disk hardware utilities in these three years?

It is good to backup whatever you cannot afford to lose forever.  I 
would check the drive with Disk Utility (OS X) or Disk First Aid (OS 9 
or earlier).  Run any repairs based on the messages you get.  If that 
does not resolve things, I would run TechTools Pro and followup on any 
repairs it wants.  If these measures work out ok, but symptoms persist, 
the next step would be to defragment the drive.  TechTools Pro can do 
that.  But make sure you have plenty of empty space on the drive, say 
30 or 40 percent.  Defragmenting requires plenty of elbow room.  Next, 
I would think about reinstalling the OS.  Beyond that, I would replace 
the drive.  I now avoid using Norton Utilities.

By the way, yes, install your spare drive.  Make sure you can start up 
from it.  Copy your good stuff from the Maxtor.  If the spare drive 
works fine and you no longer have bad symptoms, you can explore your 
Maxtor at leisure.  I cannot say much about disk mirroring; I wouldn't 
mess with that until you know you have two good drives to start with.

Good Luck,

Al Poulin
Anger, hate, and revenge are for the devil, forgiveness is for God, 
proactive self-defense is for the rest of us.

On Nov 24, 2004, at 2:40 AM, B Yen wrote:
>
> I have a G4/667 I got back in Aug 2001, which came with a Maxtor 60G
> (product #5T060H6).
>
> No problems with the machine (except for some mouse-freeze lockups, 
> coming
> out of "sleep" mode).  However, within last several months, I think my
> Maxtor 60G is having problems.
>
> 1st, I hear these beeping signals..which I think is coming from the 
> Maxtor
> drive.  (or is it coming from the G4?)  I think it's having difficulty
> coming out of sleep mode (when it powers down after a period of 
> non-use).
> It may go thru many attempts (I can hear some clicking, & the program
> menus can't execute), before the machine "gets the drive back" & comes 
> out
> of sleep.
>
> A few times, I get these Finder error messages:
>
> "there is a problem with Macintosh HD, some data may be lost"
>
> What is going on?  Am I looking at an impending system failure?  
> Should I
> toss this disk & get a new one?  I've gotten away without any daily
> backups (or even longer than that), I just basically periodically dump
> some important files onto CD-R.
>
> I have a spare 120G WD lying around..should I install it & setup some 
> kind
> of "disk-mirroring"?