This afternoon I cropped one of the photos Sharon transferred to the iBook when we met for lunch on Thursday. It came out well so I added it to our high school class blog then while I was preparing to attach it to an email message to send to her, there was a regular ticking sound from inside the G4 desktop case.
I was hoping it was something caught in a fan, but the computer froze up. I depressed the power button on the front until it turned off, then I opened the case to see if an enterprizing spider or other critter or just plain dirt (like the monster dust kitties in my apartment in Milwaukee) was keeping a fan from spinning. Nothing visible.
Next I detached the LaCie firewire external drive, where fortunately I keep almost every single document and image, and tried booting with just the keyboard, mouse, and monitor attached. Same dreadful clicking, followed by a flashing folder icon on the monitor. I shut down again with the power button and inserted a OS X install disk and it booted up. The internal hard drive was showing in the disk utility, but it didn’t mount and the verify button was greyed out. Sigh. I rebooted several times including with the computer on its side after removing and reattaching the HD power and connector inside and found that it would boot just fine on the external drive which has OS 9 installed. I tried the AppleCare Tech Tool CD and that and the OS 9 disk utility didn’t even see a drive there.
I was thinking “good thing I ordered the iBook when I did.” That is why I am online now, have been transferring some things over to it.
In one of the reboots, I thought I heard the internal HD turning. Sure enough, when booted from the OS X install disk, it not only was visible, I was able to mount it and verify it. Hmm, could this be stiction?
Anyway, I re-attached the external drive and am now creating a disk image of the entire 10 GB drive, which includes system software, OS X applications, the mail spool and application libraries. I am thinking that when that is done, will reboot from the internal disk and leave it run. Stop back for the next exciting saga of as the hard drive turns…
