On Aug 21, 2014, at 11:08 AM, jentypo <[email protected]> wrote: > Greetings, G-Book members: > > I have a toughie that's taking me time to figure out. I use an Aluminum > PowerBook G4--have for several years, and I work it very hard. I've had > internal hard drives wear out due to bad sectors being re-assigned, and I can > verify that the drive is "FAILING" using the SMART Utility. However, is there > any way to verify the SMART status of a drive without taking apart the > PowerBook, literally installing the drive and booting from that computer? > That seems to be the only way to make an "UNSUPPORTED" check.
The issue is that SMART status reporting is managed at the lower SATA or IDE hardware interface level, and connecting via external means (such as firewire or USB) is not supported under OS X. There are open source drivers that will allows things like smartmontools <http://www.smartmontools.org/> to access some (not all) external interfaces, <https://github.com/kasbert/OS-X-SAT-SMART-Driver> , getting all this running on a G4 powerbook would require a fair bit of work, I think. Here, for example, is the process to get smartmontools set up under os x 10.9: <http://mulita.com/blog/?p=7200> In theory, if you have the Developer tools installed, you may be able to get this installed under 10.5 or 10.4, at which point you would be able to get the info you want. You may have to back down to older versions or work through a lot of changes in the makefile and figuring out how to back port stuff to older libraries. In general though, the only real solution for failing hard drives is surprise, and a fanatical devotion to backing up your data. The TWO real solutions are surprise, a fanatical devotion to backing up your data and regularly testing your backups. The THREE real solutions are ...:-) (No one expect the Drive Failure Inquisition!) -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Books, a group for those using G3 iBooks and PowerBooks (we run a separate list for G4 'Books). The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To leave this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g-books Support for older Macs: http://lowendmac.com/services/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "G-Books" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
