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TICKET ARCHIVE -> iBook G4 Hard Drive Dying

monktus - Dec 16, 2006 - 4:49 pm

My girlfriend's iBook was acting strangly and being very slow today, as well as making strange noises. When I got home I had a look at it and thought it must be the hard drive so I rebooted in single user mide and fsck-ed it. After leaving it a while to boot up, it didn't find OSX. I just tried booting up from the Tiger installer to run Disk Utility but now the drive isn't even mounting.

Obviously we're going to have to get the drive replaced, which is inconvenient but not too big a deal. However, does anyone have any suggestions gettting it to mount in order to recover some of the data? I've also tried an Ubuntu live CD however the drive wasn't visible with that either (although I wasn't sure if it would need to be mounted with the terminal or whatever).

It's a 1GHz iBook G4 with 512mb RAM and the 30 GB HDD, running 10.4.7 (as far as I remember).

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

nhmac - Dec 17, 2006 - 10:52 am

Have you tried firewire target disk mode?

If that does not work you might have better luck with a utility, either DiskWarrior or Data Rescue. Of course if the drive will not spin up (can you hear it spinning up?) these will not work either.

You may know this already, but I'd also like to mention that replacing the hard drive in the iBooks is a rather involved job -- you have to disassemble almost the entire machine to do it. (Not sure what Apple was thinking on that one.) If I recall, instructions are available at iFixit.com.

Once you get it out you could try putting it in an enclosure (if it spins up.)

--Beverly

monktus - Dec 18, 2006 - 6:18 am

Thanks Beverly. I hadn't thought of target mode for some reason, it worked and I got everything important backed up. I tried to reformat the disk and re-install Tiger but Disk Utility was getting stuck on creating the partition map so it seems pretty boned.

I'd already had a look at iFixit so I noticed that it's aquite awkward to replace the drive. I tried to do it once with a clamshell iBook and hoped that Apple had made things a bit easier since then, obviously not! I'm going to buy a new drive this week and either have a go myself or ask a friend to do it. Alternatively, I found a Mac repair guy locally who'll do it for £55.

Thanks again for the help.

nhmac - Dec 18, 2006 - 8:17 am

Oh good, I'm glad you got the chance to back up your files! Sounds like you are all set from here, thanks for using macosx.com, and do let us know if you have more questions.

best,

Beverly
http://beverlywoods.net