On 2018-02-24 22:33 Valter Prahlad wrote: > The OP problem is definitely NOT an HDD failure. > > Even if the HDD was toast, the Mac would not shutdown: it would say "I can't > find any boot disk" - or something like that. > And if the HDD was corrupted, the Mac would show the folder icon with a > flashing question mark (meaning "Cannot find a valid system to boot").
HDD failures don't have to be total. Sometimes only some sectors are corrupted and that's what makes it act up, including the possibility to have it shut down on its own afer a certain timeout. It must be over 20 years ago that I had a PC with Linux on it. It would boot and error messages wouldn't stop. I rebooted and everytime the errors and messages were different with me ending up on a usable command prompt from time to time. It took me some hours of troubleshooting to find that not the Linux as the operating system was acting up -- it was the HDD, and I prooved that because one time that a bootup made it to the command prompt I used dd to write something to the disk and I then read it again and got astonishing results: some writes didn't work, for others (that obviously had worked) the reads didn't work a couple of times but worked one time or the other... It was strange but since that time I know that HDD errors can be of such kind: different sectors were working and not working randomly. BTW a Windows on the same HDD didn't come this far... (BSOD, Blue Screen of Death...) I don't know how Mac OS (the Classic one) and Mac OS X acts if it has trouble reading data during bootup, because HDDs became more reliable over the years and since I've started using Macs (around 2006 or so) I didn't encounter such a situation ever again. Cheers, Mac User #330250 -- -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "G-Group" 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.
