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15" PowerBook G4 1.67 GHz hard drive failures
Mac portable hard drive failure is hardly a new issue, but some models seem to be more prone to drive failure, due to specific hard drives used and possibly production run dates.
In-house both of our 12" PowerBook G4s' hard drives have failed, necessitating a tedious replacement process. Cursory examination of reader reports also reveals this model as one of the most prone to drive failure.
Now MacFixIt reader Jason Westlake reports on widespread failure of 15" PowerBook G4 1.67 GHz hard drives within his organization.
Jason writes:
"I'm having a big problem with hard drive failures in 15" PowerBook G4s, 1.67 GHz models. In the last year, I've lost 10 of 13 hard drives, one machine has even died twice. The failures are all the same: if the user is working, they get a kernel panic and upon reboot, nothing... flashing question mark. If they just boot up from scratch, the same question mark appears. The hard drives themselves simply make 'ka-chunk ka-chunk' noises. Sometimes I get an error in Apple Hardware Test, sometimes it passes with no problem. Four of the 10 failures have occurred in the last 2 weeks. The remainder occurred all during another two or three week timeframe earlier this year.
"All machines were manufactured in 2005 from the same factory (Shanghai, China) as evidenced by the serial numbers W8xxxxxxxxx. Five of the failures have sequential serial numbers. These five were all purchased in July 2005.
"I've got an open case with Apple Customer Relations for this issue, and I'm still waiting for some sort of meaningful resolution beyond simply replacing the hard drive. Apple Engineering believes this to simply be coincidence; somehow I doubt that five sequential serial numbered laptops all just coincidentally had hard drive failures."
If you've experienced hard drive failure with a 15" PowerBook G4 1.67 GHz, please drop us a line, including a information the drive brand. This information can be obtained by opening System Profiler (located in Applications/Utilities) then going to the Serial-ATA or ATA pane under "Hardware." The manufacturer and model of the internal hard drive should appear in the listing.
Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.
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In my case, my system froze while I was working and I heard the "clunking noise". I had to force shutting off the PB. Upon powering up, all I had was a black screen. The drive died in such a way that it hosed almost all of the external buses (firewire 400, 800) so that I could not boot from an external drive. The only thing I could boot from was a CD (Diskwarrior, etc.) and the internal drive was not to be found.
I had to send the PB to Apple (Applecare) and wait a full week (they were out of stock on the drives).
HMG
All right so I am not the only one. I?ve had exactly the same problem few days ago with my PB 15" 1.67 GHZ alum purchased in NOV 2004 (apple store @ Manhattan), the kernel panic, the "Ka-chung" or "clunking noise", and after rebooting it many times... nothing happened. The internal drive was, I believe, because I have no access it anymore, a 80 GB Hitachi.
It was my first PB, first Mac and first time this is happening to me. In my particular case, I am currently in mission in Africa for few months, in DRC, and I do not know how to reach the closet Applecare.
Question, do you think I have lost all my data on this HD or is it possible to recover them?
Many thanx
HL
I have a bunch of PowerBooks that I support, and none have lost drives.
We have had a number of bad runs over the years from Western Digital, Fujitsu and others.
Nothing new, and you usually only need to contact the drive makers to get replacements.
It happens with laptops and desktops.
SB
> The hard drives themselves simply make 'ka-chunk ka-chunk' noises.
Been there, heard that.
(Not with a PowerBook, but with several external drives over the years.)
Regardless:
The drives are likely almost as dead as they can be.
Someone, like DriveSavers, might be able to scrub the data off them.
It depends on how much damage they've taken, initially and from repeated reboots.
It'll cost some kilo-bucks to find out if a recoverer like DriveSavers can image them or not.
(Been there too, with good results, thankfully.)
The ka-chunka ka-chunka sound is the heads trying to line up with the tracks.
They never will: Something has fundamentally changed their relationship.
The drives _will_ have to be replaced -- they are so dead that you will be lucky if you get anything off them.
Good luck with your data.
-=-Dennis
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- by Squished Squirrel October 29, 2006 9:58 PM PST
- Wow... 15 months is pretty quick.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(6 Comments)We purchased 20 Aluminum G4 powerbooks when they first came out. Of those, I would estimate I have replaced better than half of the drives. Those were all Fujitsu 80GB drives. Users would complain of programs opening slowly, and sure enough, there would be read errors in the system log. Typically, they would fail fairly slowly, so recovery was usually possible.
Other laptop drives would crater with kachunk-kachunk sounds, but if you were real lucky, and caught it soon, you might get them to show up one more time, and sometimes reorienting the laptop into its side would get you one more chance at recovery.
Does anyone have a Toshiba laptop drive that hasn't cratered? Its gotten to the point where I just automatically replace 20-40GB Toshiba drives because I know they WILL fail.
It is disheartening to see 30GB Maxtor drives from the first G4's humming away 6 years later, and 2 year old un-abused laptop drives crapping out after 2-3 years.
Mean Time Between Failures... yeah... right.