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

[Stroller]

On 9 Jan 2006, at 04:21, Jim Robertson wrote:

> ...There are two internal drives in this Mac, both IBM/Hitachi  
> DeskStars....
>
> ... I tried to do a secure erase (write all zeros) of the boot  
> drive. That
> ...hung up with the progress bar about 3/4 done and the timer
> saying it had about 5 minutes to go...
> 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?

Disclaimer: I haven't seen a knackered hard-drive on a Mac yet, but I  
see them on a weekly basis on PeeCees. This yells out "knackered hard- 
drive" to me. The secure erase wasn't necessary, but it has  
illustrated the problem - difficulties writing to a disk sector 3/4  
of the way across the drive - in a way that random writes have not.  
It's likely that during the reinstall after the force-restart the  
drive was nowhere near 3/4 full, and so the dodgy sector was never used.

Hard-drives often deteriorate incrementally, typically over a period  
of a few weeks, First they have trouble reading or writing to one or  
two sectors, causing the computer to hang for no apparent reason (but  
in fact when it's trying to use those sectors), then a few more  
sectors go causing Windows boxes (no idea about Macs) to do  
filesystem checking on bootup. Finally the disk becomes just  
completely unusable, either showing no usable filesystems or being  
unrecognised by the BIOS. Drive noise can may (or may not) become  
pronounced during this period - if you hear a regular clicking noise  
then backup your data IMMEDIATELY & replace the drive.

I think the reason the knackered drive is causing the good one to be  
unrecognised is probably something like it causing additional &/or  
extraneous data to be spewed down the EIDE bus. The controller is  
probably so busy trying to talk to the bad one that the good one  
can't get a word in edgeways, and goes unnoticed in the noise.  
Whatever the reason it's common for a knackered drive to *apparently*  
take out the good one - I'm pretty confident that if you remove the  
duff drive the other one will work perfectly.

Check the dead drive's serial number in the manufacturer's warranty  
database - it's not unusual for hard-drives to have 3-year  
guarantees. I've heard this model of IBMs referred to as  
"DeathStars", but I don't think that this is a reflection of any real  
quality-control issues with them, more like just geeks' propensity  
for such wordplay. I heard there was a period a couple of years ago  
when IBM had a higher-than-normal failure rate, but hard-drives are  
the most failure-prone component in a computer and all manufacturers  
have problems occasionally - I'm sure IBM have sorted it out, and I  
wouldn't hesitate to buy IBM drives myself.

Stroller.