[G4] hard drive madness

[James Pacyga]

Does the Disk Utility show a S.M.A.R.T. status for the drive that is 
problematic?

I have noticed (using my G4/500 system for video/audio) that I have had 
2 drives fail over the past 5 years (one WD one Maxtor).  The SMART 
status should tell you if the drive is feeling ill.  If the drive does 
not support SMART, then you might want to assume it is going bad and 
replace it to be safe.

The only other option is to go to the manufacturer site and download 
their WINDOW based diag utils that you can interrogate the disk and see 
if it failing mechanically.

Jim

On Oct 15, 2005, at 12:10 PM, John Bateman wrote:

> good afternoon;
>
> i have an AGP G4 500, 1.12GB RAM, OS 10.3.9
>
> i have various issues with hard drives that may or may not be related. 
> been saving up the problems for a while.
>
> my system has three internal drives: 2 IDE, 1 SCSI. i have 1 external 
> USB 2.0 drive hooked up to a sonnet USB 2.0 PCI card.
>
> my primary IDE works fine. no complaints.
>
> my second IDE drive started glitching a bit yesterday... the icons 
> next to the file names in column view were disappearing, and i 
> repeatedly received an error message -50, file could not be written or 
> read, when trying to move the files to another drive. i shut it down 
> for an hour or so and was able to copy everything off of it. it's a 
> 40GB maxtor, with about 20 GB free, disk utility checked it out 
> alright once it was running again. should i format it and try again?
>
> my SCSI drive does not ever mount in 10.3.x. once i upgrade to any 
> update, the drive disappears and won't mount. it shows up in system 
> profiler but not in the finder. i'd like to have it back.
>
> my external maxtor drive won't remount if it gets unmounted due to 
> energy saving techniques. i unplug it and plug it back in, and it 
> might remount once in thirty times, but i hate having to reboot every 
> time to fix it up.
>
> it's almost time for a new system, maybe a quicksilver...
>
> thanks
>
> Thank you;
>
> John Bateman
> A+ Certified Computer Technician
> (904) 982-4496
>
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