[Ti] Upgraded Hard Drive in Big Al - problems

[Kynan Shook]

Stranger things have happened, Steve.  I repair Macs at a very large 
university.  A few months ago, we got 4 identical Quicksilver G4 towers 
from one of the university computer labs with identical problems; none 
would reliably burn CD-Rs (though all read CDs just fine).  We tend to 
get one or two of these every once in a while-always from the public 
labs though, and never privately or staff-owned machines, which I find 
odd.
So, we did our usual repair; all 4 were under warranty, so we ordered 4 
new drives.  After replacing them all, they all had the same or similar 
problems; none would burn with anywhere near 100% reliability.  We 
called Apple and did a bunch of troubleshooting; we determined that 
with Verbatim media (IIRC) they burned just fine (everything else, such 
as Imation and Maxell failed some of the time), but this wasn't an 
option for us.  After hassling Apple a bit, we brought in another 
machine from the labs that was working fine, to determine if there was 
anything different about it; same drive model and firmware, etc.  We 
ended up replacing various other parts (logic board and such), and it 
finally came down to just replacing the combo drives again, which fixed 
it, oddly enough.  Very strange that we'd get 4 drives all with the 
same problem from Service stock (which is almost always good the first 
time we get it in my experience).

Anyway, just an anecdotal story showing that things don't always make 
sense, and that the engineers at Apple might be using a different 
procedure with good results.

Steve Wozniak <steve at woz.org> writes:
> It is odd that these problems are so obvious but I get told by Apple 
> that 80 GB drives work fine.


Kynan Shook
kshook at mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/kshook/index.html