dying ibook-drive
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A couple of days ago I was having a look at somebody else’s iBook... and because I had my head in disk utility and such, all of a sudden I discovered my own 20GB tiny whining ibook-drive was dying (SMART-errors)... So, even though this is always bad news, this time I had the time to go out, buy another drive and put that back into my little green ibook. The drive I put in is a Samsung 80GB 5400RPM. There was hardly a price difference between that one and the cheapest 40GB-drive.
But, replacing the drive was the easiest part as it seemed… My guess was to connect the old drive via firewire, by the means of a harddisk-enclosure with USB and firewire, and image the whole thing onto the new drive… But… it seemed there already were some errors on the disk and no matter what I did, Disk Utilty wouldn’t complete it’s task… I tried Disk Warrior but that one also wouldn’t have a go on my old drive, too many errors… It seemed I really didn’t wait too long to replace the drive after all, although I hadn’t noticed anything in particular in OS X itself.
Any way, after long hours on this ‘problem’ to get my old install onto the new drive, the solution which worked for me was the following. I partitioned the drive in three parts, installed Panther (which I have on CD-Roms and my iBook doesn’t have a DVD-drive) onto the second partition. I booted from that and then I could image the old disk, which I connected by firewire, with good old dd
dd bs=512 if=/dev/disk2s9 of=/dev/disk0s10 conv=noerror,syncmore info here
disk2s9 is the bootpartition on my old drive
disk0s10 is the bootpartition on my new drive
Once the image was in place, I booted in single-user mode and ran fsck until the drive seemed fine…
So, next to the fact that my old ibook has a fresh drive now, are there any other differences?
Output from Xbench:
a while ago on my old drive:
Disk Test 11.45Sequential 26.00Uncached Write 22.30 13.69 MB/sec [4K blocks]Uncached Write 23.75 13.44 MB/sec [256K blocks]Uncached Read 34.19 10.01 MB/sec [4K blocks]Uncached Read 26.56 13.35 MB/sec [256K blocks]Random 7.34Uncached Write 2.26 0.24 MB/sec [4K blocks]Uncached Write 22.16 7.09 MB/sec [256K blocks]Uncached Read 31.50 0.22 MB/sec [4K blocks]Uncached Read 38.33 7.11 MB/sec [256K blocks]and now, on the new drive:
Disk Test 26.85Sequential 42.42Uncached Write 42.76 26.26 MB/sec [4K blocks]Uncached Write 50.55 28.60 MB/sec [256K blocks]Uncached Read 32.39 9.48 MB/sec [4K blocks]Uncached Read 49.35 24.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]Random 19.64Uncached Write 6.50 0.69 MB/sec [4K blocks]Uncached Write 58.93 18.87 MB/sec [256K blocks]Uncached Read 53.66 0.38 MB/sec [4K blocks]Uncached Read 70.83 13.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]well, that’s quite an improvement! So much even that my old G3 ibook now got a score of 15.33(!!!) in Xbench... which, ahem, means it performs at roughly 15% of what a dual G5 2.0GHz is capable of (and that’s already obsolete nowadays!)... *^_^*
Well, and what does Bates think of all this?
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Fallen asleep!? What a twat by not paying attention, he could have learned so much.
I think she thinks your iBook is so slow it makes her fall asleep in comparison to the G5…
Cats can be such twats…
Bates is so uber cute
Yes, Bates is verrrry cute.
Mmmm. . G3. PPC FOREVER!!!
I’m trying to acquire a G3 14. It’s SOUP UP TIME!!
I’ve got my hands on a 700MHz G3 SnowBook, and I’m running Xbench on it right now, with a final score of…
11.66!