[X4U] Hard drive or hard drive controller gone (mirrored doors G4)

[Jim Robertson]

1 GHz mirrored doors G4 (first generation). Was running OS X 10.4.3 with all
updates.

Two days ago applications began halting. For example, playback in iTunes
would just stop for a few seconds. Curiously, the artist/album information
at the top of the main iTunes window would continue to scroll even while the
playback of songs was interrupted. Other applications also paused
unpredictably.

Activity Monitor didn't indicate anything hogging processor cycles or any
memory leaks. The same symptoms occurred with any of the three users on the
machine.

There are two internal drives in this Mac, both IBM/Hitachi DeskStars. I ran
disk first aid/disk utility from the Tiger installation DVD, and it reported
that there was an incorrect sibling on the boot drive. It said the other
drive was OK.

My son said there was nothing absolutely critical on the boot drive, so I
tried to do a secure erase (write all zeros) of the boot drive. That failed
(actually, it hung up with the progress bar about 3/4 done and the timer
saying it had about 5 minutes to go; perhaps I shouldn't say that the
process hung, but I waited an hour, and it STILL said it had 5 minutes to go
to complete the secure erase. So, I force-restarted the computer, and now
the installer (and Disk Utility and System Profiler) couldn't see EITHER of
the two internal drives - including the one that Disk Utility had said
earlier was fine.

Several restarts later, both internal drives appeared again. I was able to
"quick erase" the former boot drive. I'm now in the middle of doing another
erase, this time erasing free space. I'm guessing there's a hardware problem
on this drive, but I'm puzzled why sometimes the Mac, booted from the Tiger
install DVD, can't see EITHER of the two internal drive mechanisms (I
haven't erased the non-boot drive).

I'm willing to buy another ATA drive for this Mac, but I'm wondering if the
ATA controller is suspect. Any recommendations for things I should try?

Thanks so much,

Jim Robertson
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