Quote:
Originally Posted by sjk
Interesting setup. I'm curious, which type of system is it?
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It is an iBook G4 with an apparently broken/flakey ATA controller (if any HD is attached, the system eventually stops working). Maybe it is a bad solder joint, maybe it is just another marginal iBook G4 logic board (they are notorious, the one in this machine is actually the third one it has seen).
The extra bootable partitions are remnants of the disk's previous life as one of my
SuperDuper! backup disks (I have 5 volumes across two disks that I would rotate through). I intend to repartition this drive, but I do not yet have enough disk space to store the nice-to-have-but-not-critical-enough-to-backup data I have on the non-backup partition.
I would not really recommend this kind of setup, but it is working OK for me so far. Also, it feels like the system as a whole is a bit faster. The speed increase is probably just because the external disk operates at a higher RPM than did the internal disk (laptops use those slow 4200 RPM drives to save power).
The machine stopped working last December (would not boot from internal HD, CD (HW Test), DVD (Tiger install) or Firewire HD; Option-boot would freeze while scanning for volumes; Target Disk Mode would bounce the FW logo around only until another machine accessed the drive). I thought it was the logic board (again). A Mac Genius at one of the local Apple stores thought that it was probably the HD that was failing (and taking the rest of the system with it "by drawing too much power" (or something)). Replacing the HD was going to be cheaper than getting a new logic board, so I decided to try the HD first.
I replaced the HD (thanks, iFixIt!) and the system seemed to have recovered. The old HD seemed to work OK when I had it attached to a USB converter but I could not access the SMART attributes over USB. I even used
SuperDuper! to copy from the "failed" HD to the new internal HD without a hitch (another hint that the HD was not having problems that were too serious—all the data was readable without error).
Six months later, the machine failed in much the same way. I removed the "new" HD and just started booting it from my Firewire drive (where it stands now).
A bit later the HD in a Mac mini failed (it had been showing a failing SMART status for a while—it really was failing) and I had a chance to test my "failed" HDs. They both worked fine in the mini, including a Verified SMART status in Disk Utility. I left the newer HD in the mini where it has been working for several weeks now.