Sawtooth Hard Drive problems - 09/11/09 03:54 PM
Hi all,
I'm new to this forum, but I'm a long time mac user. I thought I'd post here because I have a feeling this will likely be a long thread, and it might as well be in the correct forum.
Okay, so I've got a Sawtooth, a PowerMac G4 400 speed. It's got 4 hard drives in it. Two are Parallel, a 20 GB and a 6 GB. The 20 GB is the startup disk, running Tiger 10.4.11. I've got two media SATA drives, a 1 TB and a 1.5 TB. Both western Digital Green models. PCI slots have a SATA card, the original ATI radeon, and also a USB 2.0 card with some external peripherals.
Now, here's the story. I had three drives, and I just recently got the 1.5 green drive. Everything was working fine before that (except the stupid SATA card doesn't support deep sleep), but the 1.5 drive has been having some issues. First, it needed to be formatted before it would show up at all. I.E the Finder asked to initialize it--it didn't recognize it. That's not normal for a brand new drive.
After formatting, It would stall the computer for a few minutes--no mouse movement, no response at all. Well, it was usually when the finder tried to access that drive it would stall. So I ran Disk Utility on it, and it found some corrupted stuff it could repair (some corrupted nodes). That fixed it temporarily (Oh, SMART status has always been verified). But then it started freezing again, and then once again the finder threw an Initialize message. Disk Utility said it had some corrupted nodes (again) and this time, it couldn't repair it--it would just quit the repair. I was thinking, "ok, I got a bad drive. New drive, it just was a lemon."
But then I noticed my 6 GB drive was just... gone. It didn't show up on the desktop, it didn't show up in Disk Utility either. Checked the cables to it, nothing wrong. So I restarted (off the 20 GB internal), and opened up Disk Utility again. I got a kernal panic this time, and when I restarted from that, I got the flashing question mark.
So I grabbed my Firewire disk and booted off of that. My 6 GB drive still is nowhere to be found. Now I've got invalid node structures that cannot be repaired on the startup drive, the 20 GB one. The 1.5 TB one still has the same problem. Only my 1 TB drive seems unaffected so far. I checked the cables, power--everything is plugged in.
I could believe that my 1.5 TB drive is faulty, but I can't see how it could kill off two other drives too.
Only other thing that was changed is I added a new stick of Ram, a 512 from OWC. I added the new Ram after the 1.5 went down for the last time, but before the startup drive kernel panicked and was corrupted. The problems to that point had been just with the 1.5 TB disk, though to be honest I don't know if the 6 GB disk had vanished before the new ram--it's small, I don't necessarily see it all the time. Thinking this might be the issue, I yanked the new Ram, but it didn't solve anything I could see.
So, is there something I'm missing? If the hard drive bus itself was bad, all my drives would be gone, but the 1 TB is still there. Ditto if the SATA card or PCI bus went berserk--the PATA drives would be unaffected, right? Maybe a bad stick of ram corrupted things, but I was having that problem with the 1.5 TB before that ram stick came, and possibly the small drive had vanished too. There had never been any issues with it ever. SMART status has always verified on all drives.
External drives seem to be unaffected, the ones in my USB 2.0 card and also Firewire.
I got this computer a couple of years ago, and it didn't come with the apple hardware test CD, so unless anyone knows how to get that, I can't run it.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!
I'm new to this forum, but I'm a long time mac user. I thought I'd post here because I have a feeling this will likely be a long thread, and it might as well be in the correct forum.
Okay, so I've got a Sawtooth, a PowerMac G4 400 speed. It's got 4 hard drives in it. Two are Parallel, a 20 GB and a 6 GB. The 20 GB is the startup disk, running Tiger 10.4.11. I've got two media SATA drives, a 1 TB and a 1.5 TB. Both western Digital Green models. PCI slots have a SATA card, the original ATI radeon, and also a USB 2.0 card with some external peripherals.
Now, here's the story. I had three drives, and I just recently got the 1.5 green drive. Everything was working fine before that (except the stupid SATA card doesn't support deep sleep), but the 1.5 drive has been having some issues. First, it needed to be formatted before it would show up at all. I.E the Finder asked to initialize it--it didn't recognize it. That's not normal for a brand new drive.
After formatting, It would stall the computer for a few minutes--no mouse movement, no response at all. Well, it was usually when the finder tried to access that drive it would stall. So I ran Disk Utility on it, and it found some corrupted stuff it could repair (some corrupted nodes). That fixed it temporarily (Oh, SMART status has always been verified). But then it started freezing again, and then once again the finder threw an Initialize message. Disk Utility said it had some corrupted nodes (again) and this time, it couldn't repair it--it would just quit the repair. I was thinking, "ok, I got a bad drive. New drive, it just was a lemon."
But then I noticed my 6 GB drive was just... gone. It didn't show up on the desktop, it didn't show up in Disk Utility either. Checked the cables to it, nothing wrong. So I restarted (off the 20 GB internal), and opened up Disk Utility again. I got a kernal panic this time, and when I restarted from that, I got the flashing question mark.
So I grabbed my Firewire disk and booted off of that. My 6 GB drive still is nowhere to be found. Now I've got invalid node structures that cannot be repaired on the startup drive, the 20 GB one. The 1.5 TB one still has the same problem. Only my 1 TB drive seems unaffected so far. I checked the cables, power--everything is plugged in.
I could believe that my 1.5 TB drive is faulty, but I can't see how it could kill off two other drives too.
Only other thing that was changed is I added a new stick of Ram, a 512 from OWC. I added the new Ram after the 1.5 went down for the last time, but before the startup drive kernel panicked and was corrupted. The problems to that point had been just with the 1.5 TB disk, though to be honest I don't know if the 6 GB disk had vanished before the new ram--it's small, I don't necessarily see it all the time. Thinking this might be the issue, I yanked the new Ram, but it didn't solve anything I could see.
So, is there something I'm missing? If the hard drive bus itself was bad, all my drives would be gone, but the 1 TB is still there. Ditto if the SATA card or PCI bus went berserk--the PATA drives would be unaffected, right? Maybe a bad stick of ram corrupted things, but I was having that problem with the 1.5 TB before that ram stick came, and possibly the small drive had vanished too. There had never been any issues with it ever. SMART status has always verified on all drives.
External drives seem to be unaffected, the ones in my USB 2.0 card and also Firewire.
I got this computer a couple of years ago, and it didn't come with the apple hardware test CD, so unless anyone knows how to get that, I can't run it.
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!