I’ve been doing a lot of Google searches for phrase strings such as “powerbook g4 hard drive dead” and “powerbook g4 system profiler recognize”. I’ve just read a lot of other PowerBook owner’s woes described on their blogs about their PowerBook’s failed hard drive.
As you can tell, I’ve had my own disaster this week. About a week ago I was doing dishes and when I turned around my PowerBook was flashing the ominous “Flashing Question Mark of Death”. This means that the computer cannot find the system disk, the hard disk which contains the operating system. With no operating system the computer just flashes the question mark telling you it needs an operating system to run off of. So, I booted up off the OSX install CD, and ran Disk Utility and could not find my internal hard drive. I installed a fresh copy of OSX on an external drive and booted off that. Ran Disk Utility, Disk Warrior, Tech Tool Pro, Drive Genus with no luck. No drive.
I gave up on my internal drive and have been making due with the basic install of 10.3.2 on the external drive.
Today I decided to give my internal one last chance to live. I carefully opened my powerbook, which took about 45 minutes to do properly. They certainly don’t make it easy to access the PowerBook’s guts. once inside, i removed the HD and holding it in my hand shook it in the air in every direction vigorously for 20 seconds. Put it back in and hooked up the internal ribbon to the keryboard so i could boot er up. No luck booting off the internal drive, but atleast I wasn’t getting the dreaded question mark. Instead, I would get to the startup progress bar to have it sit and stall at “Waiting for Local Disks”. I restarted, booting in safe mode OS off the external drive. Presto. I open system profiler and see that my computer is now recognizing my internal drive. YAY! Without wasting any time, I am now backing up the entire contents of the internal drive to the external drive. Once done, I will run a series of diagnostics on the internal drive. I’m sure it’s days are numbered. Harddrives are like tires on a car, they are spinning constantly and eventually wear out. I will have to get a new one eventually, but atleast this clever manouvre saved me all my otherwise lost data.
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