[G4] Failing HD (was: Me, too)

[John Baltutis]

On 07/28/04, Nicolas Kinnan <nasw at pcmagic.net> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the tip, it's what I figured.  The problem is that many
> things are written to what must be the bad spots on the disk, so when I
> do try to copy them to other media (CD-R or my video drive), it causes
> the same thing -- a crash and then failure of the operation.  I know
> it's my own damn fault for filling my HD up to 99% of its capacity, but
> I only recently learned that one should not do that.  Would Norton or
> Diskwarrior help me repair the damaged files so I could do a transfer?
> This only started happening after I updated to 9.2.2 a couple of years
> ago and used to only be a problem while booting into OS9 or Classic...
> But now it's spreading.
>

The first thing you should do. before trying to repair the disk, is move
files/folders to another disk, one at a time. If successful (i.e., no
crash), then erase that file/directory from the faulty disk. Keep doing
this until you've reclaimed 10-20% of free disk space. Then try repairing
it. Use Disk First Aid/Disk Utility to repair it, booting with the install
CD (you can't repair a boot volume). Then try moving the rest of your stuff
to another drive. If you can do that, then you should be able to erase it,
reformat it, and that should isolate the bad blocks and fix the bad files.
If it doesn't work, then you might try Disk Warrior or Norton Utilities.