"Dead" HD in G4 Mini?

[Bunsen]

Hi folks,

Can anyone offer pointers to solving the following problem for a client? The machine is a G4 1.4GHz Mac Mini, and it was working fine when it left my hands.

Its seems the hard drive has failed.
After tracked down an apple power supply on ebay, I have been

working on this unit over the weekend for the first time

downloading the operating system updates etc. It was working

beautifully last night. I left it on over night, last night and this

morning it had frozen and had to be hard restarted.

It never got past the grey apple screen. I tried every trick in my

book, and even tried to re-install with a set of start up disks

from my old ibook - but that could not find a hard drive to

install to. Which suggests the hard drive has failed.

My first thoughts are that the iBook install disks wouldn't have worked anyway, being machine specific. Second, that the HD is probably not truly dead, but may need I dunno, permissions repaired or something?

Any help appreciated.

 

[blixanz]

Sounds like it is a 'dead hd' given the circumstances you said. You could always try and take the drive out, and put it in an external enclosure to see if it is recognised on another machine.

 

[Franklinstein]

Aside from whatever identification strings and machine-specific features that may or may not be enabled in OF (i.e, video spanning), the iBook G4, PowerBook G4 Al, late-model eMac, and Mac Mini are virtually the same, excepting A/V subsystems; they've all got the same Intrepid system controller and AirPort/USB 2.0/modem components, PowerPC 74xx-series processor, etc. So, software that doesn't check the hardware ID strings in OF will have little reason to run on one but not the other.

I've used restore discs from 800MHz iBooks to install OS 9.2.2 and OS X 10.2 on machines with compatible hardware (i.e., those based on the Grackle/UniNorth/Pangea system controllers), and have had no problems, other than the iBook-specific documentation, and the iBook registration software that starts on the first boot of 9.2.2.

So as long as your client was using software from an iBook G4, there shouldn't have been a problem. I'd guess that the hard drive died or became corrupted to some degree. Of course, it could just be a case of loose connectors or something, as well. Grab a putty knife and have a look, maybe pull the drive and try to mount it in a different machine or something while you're at it.