From: "doobisary" <tjp314@pacbell.net>

Date: July 22, 2010 12:18:39 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: My Powerbook G4 is dying!

I ordered a 320GB drive from iFixit on Tuesday morning and it arrove at the house yesterday afternoon!

It's installed, the new OS is installed, and now I just need to run all the updates (which took a few hours last time, there were so many), and reinstall and get all my applications working again.

Only thing I don't like about the G4 is that I can't run windows on it (Virtual PC doesn't count!).  

But I really do like having two FW ports (400 & 800).

And the price was right for the repair, which only took me about 20 minutes to perform.

-tim.

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, "John" <jbuckley1@...> wrote:

--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, "doobisary" <tjp314@> wrote:

Okay, it's the hard drive.

I installed a second System folder on an external 250GB hard drive and booted from there with no problems.  I restarted several times to make sure this is the case.

Then I tried running Disk Utility on the internal drive and got the same errors saying that the file structure was incorrect and that the drive could not be repaired.

I then tried booting from the internal drive about half a dozen times and best I could do was get to the gray apple screen without the swirly time thingy under it.  More often, it would give me a "we are hanging here" message, or crash with the "you need to hold down the restart button" message.

Went back to the external drive to boot several more times, and had no problems at all.

Ordered a 320GB replacement this morning.  A lot cheaper than buying a new 15" Macbook Pro (by about 15x!).

Thanks for the help!

-Tim.

Hi Tim,

Not all bad.

I have teenage boys and an occasional HD failure.

I'm told any file sharing service is a common cause.

Somehow, I don't think that applies to the HD failure at Milton's house  (:^).

John B.