[Ti] Cautionary Story

[Erik Gaderlund]

At 01:38 PM +0100 01/09/07, Dr. Trevor J. Hutley wrote:
>On 9 Jan 2007, at 13:24, Frank Ettenberg wrote:
>
>>Hello List,  Just wanted to relate that I am a Tit. g4 1.67ghz  
>>Powerbook owner.  I bought it on ebay and the original 'owner' sold 
>>it 'as is', without the original OSX disks.  In any event, I am 
>>also a self-taught Mac user, therefore VERY prone to making 
>>mistakes in using the pb & sussing out problems with this machine.  
>>The powebook seemed to be having problems-but not really very 
>>serious ones- in early Dec during startup and in using certain 
>>applications, so I heeded some advice given here, such as getting 
>>info via Terminal.  I really didnt know what I was doing, so using 
>>a program like Terminal & AppleJack-for me- was a BIG mistake and 
>>perhaps led to the major system/hard disk malfunction that 
>>developed around Xmastime.  I could no longer get anything but an 
>>incomprehensible error message out of AppleJack-doing a command-s 
>>at startup-and the startup never got any further than the whirling 
>>circle on the grey screen.  I contacted a local technician and he 
>>said that the system malfunction was next to impossible for him to 
>>diagnose & he'd never before seen anything like it.  A mac friend 
>>of mine said that a previous user of this pb might have processed 
>>movies or videos & that process tends to really upset formatting of 
>>info on the disk.  The seller of this unit may or may not have done 
>>a clean install of the disk before selling it & the technician 
>>doubts that.  At any rate,  I appreciate the notion of info 
>>sharing, but, in effect, I as an amateur have little ability to 
>>understand what y'all are saying and recommending a large part of 
>>the time.  Just a note for everyone--this game can be very 
>>expensive, of course, especially for ignoramuses like me.  ( I paid 
>>the tech about 450 dollars to fix the problem--he recovered just 
>>about all my jpgs and other data, so at least I know I must 
>>regularly back everything up.) Anyhow, I now have a perfectly 
>>functioning pb since he formatted the disk-except that it slows 
>>down considerably when I've just started Limewire-and I have to 
>>replenish a lot of the software that was discarded in the 
>>clean/install that the tech wound up doing.
>
>Frank - probably most of us on the list are amateurs (i know some 
>are not), but with experience, and we heave learnt lessons the hard 
>way.
>
>I think the lesson from your story is "if you buy or get a Powerbook 
>from somewhere else, reformat the disk and reinstall the latest OS, 
>before you do anything else".

When formatting (also with a fresh drive) it is best practice to 
'zero all data' which means the drive re-maps (aka avoids bad 
sectors).  I've gotten a used PowerBook, and did that before 
installing the latest OS.  You might even check on Apple's support 
site on formatting drives to get more background on all the options.
-- 
erik g
gaderson at gmail.com