Powerbook problems

[giza]

Well, I had my first not-so-trivial problem with my Powerbook last night. I was in the middle of something, and I noticed that my music started skipping. It would cut out for a few seconds, then play for a few seconds. Definitely odd. So I tried opening up a terminal window, and noticed something was definitely up when it took upwards of 10 seconds to open. I put my head down to the mousepad (which the hard disk is located under) to listen for activity, and I heard... my hard disk spinning up, reading for a couple of seconds, and spinning back down again.

Figuring a reboot was in order, I gave my machine the 3 finger salute, and waited for it to come back up, watching it instead get stuck on the gray screen with the Apple logo and the spinning "pinwheel" at the bottom of the screen. I decided to "listen to the mousepad" again, and the same thing was going on with the hard disk.

The next thing I tried was disconnecting my perhipherals, followed by another reboot, straight into single user mode. Once I got a command prompt, I ran fsck, which had no problems. I then exited the shell and watched... the system boot normally. I was able to log in, access the network (after plugging back in my cable), whatever. At this point, I rebooted from my OS/X 10.3 install CD, loaded the diagnostic partition, and did an extended hardware test, which took about about 30 minutes. All hardware test successfully.

I rebooted once more, watching the machine come up normally. At that point, I did a full backup and then poked around in Apple's Knowledge Base and decided to check my Energy settings. I made sure that my hard disk was set never to spin down and set my display to go into sleep mode after 3 hours and my computer to never go into sleep mode. (this was for while plugged in) Then *I* went to sleep.

I woke up this morning and saw that my display had in fact gone to sleep. I clicked my mouse button, expecting it to wake up the display and prompt me for my password, but that didn't happen. So then I tried closing the machine to put it into suspend mode, but it did not suspend. The hard disk was still spinning, though! I could not ping the machine over the LAN nor SSH into it, though I did see a light on my hub from it. So again, I gave a three finger salute, and this time, the machine made it as far as a gray screen (no Apple logo or Pinwheel this time), then failed to boot.

I had to step out for a doctor's appointment (more on that in a future LJ post), so I shut down my Powerbook. When I came back home several hours later, it booted normally. Just for giggles, I tried suspending the machine and didn't have any problems with that. Then I tried resetting the PRAM/NVRAM and booting the machine. Ever since then, it's worked without incident.

Somewhere in there I also ran Disk Utility, and the S.M.A.R.T status on my hard drive is just fine.

I'm not sure what to make of it at this point. I don't think it's a hard disk, but think it's more something along the lines of issues with my machine's power saving capabilities. (Just as a refresher, my PB is a 15" G4 /w/ SuperDrive running at 1.5 Ghz. Bought in August of 2004. Has Apple Care.)

If anyone has any suggestions or a possible diagnosis, I'm all ears.

And two cool things I got out of this experience:

It looks like Apple manages their mailing lists with Mailman. That's pretty cool!

In the process of doing research, I installed Firefox onto my aging P3-450 that runs Linux. I was pleased to see it run faster than Opera did. And I could use the same key combinations that I used to from my Powerbook's installation.

Comments

[jayessence.livejournal.com]

Having dealt with many hdd failures and data recovery extractions from various people's hard drives in my life... I would like to suggest to keep an "eye" on the drive.

I can't tell you how many times a drive was so close to "death", when I was able to get a full data backup, before the died permanently died. Sometimes minutes, after the backup completed!

I tell people that when your drive acts up like that, its a sign of an imminent death. So, good thing you got the backup. Even though everything tested out ok in diag and SMART, I would still back sure you do more backups of your critical data. It could be a sign that end is near for the drive.

[giza.livejournal.com]

I have an external hard disk on hand for doing backups. I'm going to use that a lot more often.

I also found this utility (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/23232) which I'm going to keep running in case my hard drive does take a turn for the worse.

Thanks for the input.

[crywolf.livejournal.com]

If it happens again, resetting the power manager may help - see http://www.macintouch.com/pbg4reader20.html#mar28 (second message) for instructions on how to do this. It's also likely that zapping the PRAM already fixed it.

And in case you're not familiar with target firewire mode, holding down T while booting turns your computer into nothing more than a firewire hard drive (albeit a very expensive one).

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

If the hard drive is heading south and this is causing problems, you might want to take this moment to upgrade it to a better/faster one. They have 5400RPM laptop drives now, and they're not very expensive.

You can then take the old one and put it into a 2.5" hard drive external case, and use it as an external disk. They run right off the firewire or USB bus power and can be convenient for shuttling data around.

Good luck with your Powerbook!

[giza.livejournal.com]

Actually, my PB has a 7200 RPM drive in it already. :-)

As it is, the problem seems to have been resolved. I'll write about the additional testing I did in a future LJ entry.

Thanks for the suggestion about the external hard drive idea. I hadn't thought of that!

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

Ahh, must be a pretty recent Powerbook, then. My PBG4-867MHz has a 4200RPM drive, the typical laptop drive standard.

Wow, it must really scream with 7200RPM. I wonder if the TiBook G4 can handle the heat and power requirements of one. On the other paw, I should just wait another year or so and then just upgrade the whole thing, as it's starting to feel slow. :)

-Z

[giza.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a 1.5 Ghz Al model with SuperDrive.

So even if the hard disk does melt down, I've got 2.5 years of AppleCare left. :-)