Powerbook problems
Feb. 5th, 2005 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gizaWell, 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.
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.