Hard Disk Problems
Well, after spending some time last month helping my pastor with his dying hard disk, it seems I caught the same bug, so to speak. Early last week, my PowerMac G5 started to emit an odd sound — I ignored it at first. Then on Friday, I noticed that my hard disk was a lot noisier during drive access than before. Shortly thereafter, Mac OS X crashed — one of the only times it has ever done so. Taking note of this, I called AppleCare on Saturday, went through a bunch of tests, but came up with no problems on the drive.
Given that it was continuing to emit noises, I decided to go with my gut and buy another drive to back the whole thing up to. I purchased the newer variant of the same drive (both the new and old drives are Seagate 160 GB 7200 RPM SATA disks, but the newer one supports “NCQ”), installed it quickly, thanks to the effortless and tool-less hard disk install procedure that Apple engineered, and then used CarbonCopy Cloner to make a perfect copy of my old drive. Less than two hours after I opened the box for the new drive, I was running OS X and all of my applications on the new disc, with the old one relegated to backup status. The majority of that time was waiting for files to copy; it took 89 minutes to clone 70 GB of data from the old drive to the new one.
Still, I need to figure out a way to prove to AppleCare that something is fishy with the old drive. Today, the system froze twice, each time when I tried to do something fairly intensive with the old hard disk. This is unusual for OS X, which is as stable as you'd expect a BSD Unix to be, that is, rock solid. Since the drive is under warranty for another year and a half, perhaps I just need to wait for it to die completely or do something that will allow diagnostics to detect the problem, but I'd really rather have them send me a new drive now so that I can trust what has become my backup drive. If I can convince them to do so, I'd have two reliable hard disks, allowing for redundancy.
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Re: Hard Disk Problems
I must be missing something in your explaination, because I just Norton Ghost-ed a full 40gig HD onto a secondary. Then I replaced the old HD with a bigger replacement, re-ghost-ed in less then 20 mins. Doubling would still have me under an hour.
Are you doing something extra that I’m missing?
Re: Hard Disk Problems
Well, Mark, I suspect that the (free) CarbonCopy Cloner may not be as well optimized as Norton Ghost.
Still, it worked decently, and it can sync the 75 GB of data in a mere 13 minutes now that the core of the data is already there. It also could be the fact that the one hard disk seems to have shaky health at the moment.
How’d you turn the system off, install a new drive, start it back up and do the re-ghosting all in 20 minutes? You trying to create the computer equivalent of a pit crew or something?
Save for my PowerMac, I’ve yet to see a system where I could even get the hard disk installed in less than 15 or so minutes (most cases I work with require the drive cage to be removed to install a drive).
Re: Hard Disk Problems
In my last job I worked with alot of hardware. Swapping things in and out of most cases goes pretty quickly. The friend who had the issue was my brother and the case that I bough for him has very easy acces to both of his HDs.
Take off the side cover, which use the large thumb screws. Next two screws, power connector, ribbon and the HD is out. Install new, reconnect, fdisk, format, re-ghost and done.
If were talking laptops, I agree, those things are so hard to work with. And the smaller they are, the longer it takes.
Re: Hard Disk Problems