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Earlier this month Apple replaced the logic and sound boards on my Oct. '05 G4 PB. Now it's noisy as heck -- clicking, chattering and whirring all the time. Plus now the PB generates so much heat and of course the fan kicks on.
I've scheduled another Genius Bar appointment soon. Still I'm just wondering what metallic moving parts, maybe in the logic or sound board, might cause so much noise and heat buildup.
Thanks.
I've scheduled another Genius Bar appointment soon. Still I'm just wondering what metallic moving parts, maybe in the logic or sound board, might cause so much noise and heat buildup.
Thanks.
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SF Bay Area
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Wed, June 17, 2009 - 3:01 PMThose noises are usually the sound of a hard drive going bad. Make sure you do a complete back-up asap. -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Wed, June 17, 2009 - 6:09 PMsax, I think you should try to be a little more bitchy in your responses.
then i would be completely obsolete here and wouldn't have to log on at all.
=^.^= -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Wed, June 17, 2009 - 6:30 PMWell, darned.
Thanks for the diagnosis and confirmation, Sax & Mr. Kitty.
So I just took a look at OWC's hard drive replacements. "Seagate 2.5" SATA 7200" speaks to me but what else should I look for? 800 FW? If I go for a 16 Cache, will that be too much for my PB's a 1.67 GHz with L2 Cache of 512 KB? -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Wed, June 17, 2009 - 6:49 PMHAhhAhahahah with the witchy comments √
download Smart Reporter and use it
it'll warn you when your H D is going bad
www.corecode.at/smartreporter
h t h ∞
mac tech support tribe -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Wed, June 17, 2009 - 9:47 PMsmart reporter just reports the SMART status, which 90% of the time fails to report a failing drive.
oh, and by the way SMART status is available in system profiler, no extra software needed.
sorry mac tech support tribe.
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Wed, June 17, 2009 - 9:48 PMpowerbook harddrive installs are not fun. look at iresq.com
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Thu, June 18, 2009 - 1:13 PMBabe... I am currently trying to find the best hdd for my husband's 17" pb, and it seems that the G4 pbs don't take SATA drives, and the fastest I can find in an ATA is 5400. Size is hard to come by as well, biggest I've found is 160gb.
If anyone here knows differently, I would love that info, as he would prefer a faster spin. Can't afford a new MacBookPro right now, just trying to make the crabby old one (the computer, not the hubby :) a bit more cooperative.
Thanks! -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Thu, June 18, 2009 - 1:34 PMYes, powerbooks are all Parallel ATA drives (idk the 2.5s ever went higher than 5400). You can find great prices on them at OWC:
eshop.macsales.com/Search/Search.cfm
$50 - $115
However, installing a hard drive on any powerbook g4 is not a fun way to spend an afternoon. I highly recommend sending it out, either to a local service provider or iresq.com
$210 - $340
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Thu, June 18, 2009 - 1:56 PMThe husband can do it. He's extremely mechanically inclined. He's already replaced the hdd on my iMac and my MBP. He's got the patience and likes the puzzle. :) And we do have a great local place if he gets into trouble.
When I shopped for the hdd's for the other two, I couldn't believe how cheap they were! I got a 500gb Hitachi for my iMac for $65, and a 250gb Hitachi for the MBP for $79.
Thanks for the info, Kitty Kat, I can stop looking for something better, then. I will definitely check out the site you recommend. I like transintl.com, though I am not married to them if I find more capacity/better price. -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Fri, June 19, 2009 - 3:33 PMI used to use transintl.com a lot, but now I'm on the right coast and the midwest shipping is faster.
That and OWC has a lot of stuff that trans doesn't.
Oh and there was that bit where trans got infected with an outlook virus (bad windows user) and emailed it to everyone they'd ever contacted. When I replied to tell them they denied it was them, but since i use vendorname@mydomain.com, it's fairly clear who is sending me emails. -
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This is the maximum depth. Additional responses will not be threaded.
Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Mon, June 22, 2009 - 1:39 PMOWC has some great deals, cheaper than trans.
Any thoughts on Seagate vs. Western Digital? -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Mon, June 22, 2009 - 4:23 PMA year ago I would have sworn on Seagate always and ever. Then I got burned hard by their 1.5TB drives' firmware caching problems (and lost a good client over it) and poor attitudes of their support department.
And Western Digital got a hell of a lot better.
So, no, No preference at this point. I've never had a problem with either vendors currently shipping laptop drives. -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Mon, June 22, 2009 - 9:42 PMI agree with Mr. K (except about WD, who I don't give second chances to). I've switched to Hitachi since Seagate's major fuck-up. I'm really angry with Seagate; they screwed a lot of people over by refusing to acknowledge the issues. I still don't trust one of my drives because it exhibits the issues all the "fixed" drives do, but it supposedly has nothing wrong with it. YEAH RIGHT. -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Tue, June 23, 2009 - 12:34 AMI would totally prefer Hitachi, but the biggest capacity I can find is an 80GB, which is what is already in it, and he's maxxed that out, soooo...
I believe both the hdd/s I recently replaced were WD's, one for sure. So I was skeptical of replacing with a WD, but now you guys have got me terrified of Seagate...
Anyway, looks like I'll probably be ordering the WD (item descrip-- "250.0GB Western Digital "Scorpio" 5400RPM 9.5MM IDE/ATA Notebook HD 8MB buffer") from OWC, $98.97. It's only gotta last 'til we can afford a new MBP... :P
Thanks for all your input, guys and Kittys.
:) -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Tue, June 23, 2009 - 9:53 AMI have nearly the exact same model G4 PB and replaced my 80 GB internal with a Seagate 160GB 5400 (model: ST9160821A). I've had no problems with it, and it's considerably faster despite being the same rpm as the 80GB drive it came with. I can't speak about the problems Seagate has had of late, but I've never had any trouble with them.
WD on the other hand, I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. If others say they're getting better, then maybe they're worth a try.
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Thu, June 25, 2009 - 10:37 AMSo what's this firmware caching problem with Seagate 1.5TB hard drives?
Yes, I have a Seagtae 1.5TB HD. And so far, the only problem I have -- at least now I think it's the hard drive -- is it hangs up my iTunes. Freezes it and then freezes my PB's Finder. -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Thu, June 25, 2009 - 12:57 PMYou answered your own question!
Some versions of the 1.5TB drives shipped with a firmware caching problem. The cached information on the drive didn't purge correctly, causing the drive to drop offline for 10 - 60 seconds at a time during high traffic. It would eventually come back, sometimes before the system realized it had stopped responding (and dropped the drive), sometimes after. In some instances the system would actually mount the drive a second time, if it came back before the finder realized it had gone, resulting in a " 1" being added to it's BSD name (not the friendly name shown on the desktop, but the actual name of the volume shown in /Volumes/Volume Name).
This generally only shows up in apps like iTunes (which are streaming information from the disk), RAID volumes or volumes hosting AFP shares (Apple File Protocol apparently constantly accesses the host volume, so if it disappears for more than a couple of seconds, it drops the volume and shuts down the sharepoint).
I made the mistake of recommending these drives (based on Seagate's reputation) for their Xserves. It took 4 months for Seagate to push an updated firmware, while never actually admitting fault (they even went through and deleted the relevant discussions off their boards), and one of my clients got so peeved at their file server crashing so much (I had my agency just buy working 1TB drives to install for them after two weeks of being stonewalled by Seagate) that they just hired in house IT.
So, the short of it is that there is an updated firmware from Seagate. It comes as a ProDOS disk image (use toast to burn it to cd as a disk image), which will boot any Intel Mac. Your drive needs to be connected to the internal SATA bus (no external drives, no usb, no firewire), but the update takes only a moment to run. After this update, both Xserves have ran flawlessly for 5 months. -
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Fri, June 26, 2009 - 4:29 PMAnd I didn't even fully understand it. lol
Thanks, Mr. K. I'm glad you're still on tribe.
Since I bought the Seagate HD from OWC, I called OWC and was told if I opened up the enclosure I'd void the warranty. So my only real recourse is to ship it to OWC for it to update the firmware for me.
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Re: Clicking noises from my PowerBook
Thu, August 6, 2009 - 2:51 PMOK. So I had the hard drive replaced by iResQ and the clicking noise is still there. Plus the heat buildup continues.
Any chance that the replacement logic board that Apple installed recently could be making all that noise as well? It's now humming and occasionally making the sound of a droplet of water splashing onto more water.
