Chosen Solution

Today, I decided to upgrade my computer’s hard drive, I have an 800Mhz Solid White iBook G3. It had a 20GB drive, that I upgraded to 40GB (not a major upgrade, but i was running out of space) After the painstaking process of getting the thing open, and installing the drive, I installed OS tiger, and opened Disk Utility. When i got to the drive, it showed me the following message “This Drive Has Reported A Fatal Hardware Error To Disk Utility” and the S.M.A.R.T. Status was “Failing” the drive is a toshiba MK4025GAS that i removed from my old dead powerbook g4 (spilled coffee) and the drive worked fine in a USB enclosure on my PC, and never reported any errors. The drive workes fine to me, it installed tiger fine, and just to test it, i copied about 10GB of files to it, and deleted them, and did it again, and it still works fine. It doesnt make any strange noises, and the coumpuer is just as fast, if not faster than it was before. Could the drive be giving a false warning? It seems to be holding up great, and even though i could put the old drive back in it, i could use the extra space on the larger one. Any Ideas on whether the drive actually has a problem or not? Thanks, Chris

Repairing the directory (fsck and Disk Utility’s Repair Disk and Verify Disk) has nothing to do with a hardware failure as reported by SMART. Directory is software. Hardware is hardware. I would dump this drive and replace it with a new one, without hesitation. They don’t cost much. Though I guess it depends on how much you value your data. To find out more, assuming you have at least 10.4.11, download SMART Utility which will tell you exactly which attribute(s) are failing. http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/sy…

I doubt its a false warning- did you verify it as well? Since you could actually do a lot I think it may be a more minor permissions problem, but even fatal errors that are extremely dangerous can go unnoticed for a while, do a verify IMMEDIATELY. Sounds like you got a bad drive though, so I’d just return it instead of trying to see if repair is possible.

Hi, Let me see if I understand the problem

  1. drive came from an old computer of yours–not new
  2. it worked properly in an USB enclosure
  3. in the enclosure you used it with a PC
  4. you installed Tiger on it without problem I am assuming you reformatted the drive to install Tiger and are trying to reach disk utility with the install disk. At this point I think I would probably do good backups and use the drive or remove it and place it back in the USB enclosure and use it to as a backup drive. Ralph