Francis, Thanks for the info. I'm a Mac novice and no expert on any platform! I went into Disk Utility and Verify Disk/Disk Repair were both greyed out.
I've copied all my essential data onto two CDs, but am now at a bit of a loss. If the drive is physically failing, will a repair shop suggest a repair or a replacement/upgrade? If so, I'll need to decide whether to go for a Mac Mini + extra RAM, instead. If it isn't a physical/mechanical issue, is it possible that there might be things that can be done in software/firmware? Julian Mayer's site seems to be out of action at the moment.
Thanks.
Adrian
----- Original Message ----- From: "Francis Vaughan" francis@cs.adelaide.edu.au To: "Adrian Delso" adrian.delso@btopenworld.com Cc: doggiebox@lists.zygoat.ca Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2005 9:02 AM Subject: Re: [Doggiebox] Disaster!
On 07/04/2005, at 5:09 PM, Adrian Delso wrote:
The kernel panics, spontaneous resets and the bloodt beachball are not good signs.
You are not wrong. The bottom line is that these have all the symptoms of a failing disk. I'm not kidding, the syndrome is something I have seen before, as have others. Applications vanishing, random crashes, and the beachball. The first of these is directory structure corruption. The second swap space corruption, the last is page fault IO taking forever due to disk retries.
Download the SMART disk monitor: http://homepage.mac.com/julianmayer
It should tell you if it is.
However I would be looking to get your valuable data off the disk ASAP. As the disk degrades it will get worse and worse. Slowly, and then more quickly more and more data will fall off, and eventually the kernel will not boot, then the disk will also fail to boot (i.e. on power up the disk's internal controller will be unable to locate config information on the disk) at which point the disk will fail to be visible to even a low level recovery program. Then your data is really gone.
Try to avoid reboots and power cycles if you can, as eventually one of these will be the last the disk can support.
Francis.
Dr Francis Vaughan Phone: +61 8 8303 5592 School of Computer Science Fax: +61 8 8303 4366 University of Adelaide Mobile: 0414 726247 Adelaide 5005 (+61 414 726247) Australia CRICOS Provider Code 00123M
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