Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / December 2005

Hi,

Daughter lost her drive recently. Computer only 6 months old, but I can
understand the drive's reliability. It is often the luck of the draw.
Positive side, she now knows what backup means.

1) Went through the 'care' service and determined we need to send in the
computer to the factory. The care tech was not certain the drive was dead,
or corrupted.

2) Went to Apple Store and they connected an external hard drive through
fire-wire. The goal/hope was to try and recover data. I was told that the
booting up sequence was stalled on the internal hard-drive and that the
internal hard drive was dead.  The laptop never saw the firewire drive.

Q1: Is there a quick way to determine that the drive is dead, versus
corrupted? It seemed like we tried quite a few things before this conclusion
was reached on the care line. Best I can tell the critical sign was when the
little cursor with clock stopped ticking after some time and no disk icon
appeared in-between the two arrows (one curved) and one straight.

Q2: What about preventing disk corruption. This time, that was not issue.
But, what is good program for daughter to run periodically to keep stuff on
disk cleaner? e.g. On PCs winos some folks use norton (although I hear that
is not great all the time.) I have heard some folks mention disk warrior.

Q3: I had to sign up for the care, but now I find out that maybe my
step-daughters step mother may have purchased the care when she got the
laptop. But, when on line with care hotline, they did not show record of the
computer being under the 3year care policy.
Ever hear of hiccups like this?

Q4: What is a good book for a hardware/software literate person to learn
more about the mac Tiger OS? In going through the care hotline and holding
down special keys, trying this, trying that, there seems to be a lot of
back-doors to figure out what is going on with the computer. Would be
interested in learning more.

Q5: Any general advice on G4 laptop, Tiger OS, in terms of keeping computer
running smoothe would be appreciated. I need to send computer back to
factory. They are sending a box. I can't complain about the support staff.
They seem to be competent and the wait time was under 2 minutes. Not sure
you would find this with a PC.

Thanks for your time.
Merry Christmas.

Best Regards,

J