Titanium death (?)

[david]

Hi I bought a second hand Titanium 1Ghz laptop about six months ago for a supiciously bargain price on ebay. When it turned up it looked like it had been dropped out of a plane and the hard drive was making a fair bit of noise but despite this everything was fine running 10.4 untill just before Xmas.

The machine froze running an email programme and refused any attempts to force quit other than hitting the power. It then proved impossible to restart so I booted from the system disk and ran disk utility to be told than there was a problem with the B Tree node size which it could not fix. A friend booted it from his machine and ran both tech tools 4 and Disk Warrior but no data was recoverable or repair possible. Assuming this was the death of the hard drive I bought and installed a 2.5" travelstar drive but on starting the machine it wouldn't recognise the drive - even when booted from the system disk.

I installed 10.4 on an external drive, specified it as the startup disk (with intention of running diagnostics on the new drive) but was unable to get the laptop to restart from the external drive.

At this stage I am begining to think that I have no option but to just get a new laptop but if anyone has any suggestions I'd be most gratefull.

thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Ric]

Hi there David and welcome,

the fact it 'was' working is a good sign !

It's very hard to remotely diagnose, what happens when you press the power key ? Anything ?

regards

Ric

 

[david]

Hi Ric, when I hit the power key all I get is a flashing apple folder with a question mark - I can still only boot from disk and utility won't recognise the new internal drive. I have rechecked the physical installation of the drive and it seems fine so my assumption is that its a hardware fault - maybe the IDE cable?