My iMac is about to stop working

Dear FreewayTalk

I think my Mac is about to stop working. It is an iMac G3 500MHz (Summer 2001 model) and today it gave me an error message or two, before finally starting up:

disk0s5: I/O error localhost: I have no name!#

The hard disk sometimes makes odd noises, as if the arm won’t connect properly.

I was going to buy a new iMac later this year, but it looks as though I will have to buy one sooner. Currently my computer is working again, but if it stops, I will not be able to use the Internet or read FreewayTalk or even use Freeway. I have been frantically burning CDs in order to save everything while I can. If everything goes quiet at this end you will know that something has happened. I don’t think I’d better shut down my computer as I usually do.

Does anyone know what those messages mean, by the way?

Regards

Graham Smith Bury St Edmunds, UK

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Usually an I/O error occurs on a Firewire drive not mounting. A quick Google search made reference to various Firewire-based drives having this problem. Looks like they recommend Disk Utility and see if the drive has a clean bar of health and if not to repair the disk.

Backup of course. Sorry to hear about your troubles Graham.

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At 04:20 +0100 5/8/08, Graham Smith wrote:

Dear FreewayTalk

I think my Mac is about to stop working. It is an iMac G3 500MHz (Summer 2001 model) and today it gave me an error message or two, before finally starting up:

disk0s5: I/O error localhost: I have no name!#

The hard disk sometimes makes odd noises, as if the arm won’t connect properly.

I was going to buy a new iMac later this year, but it looks as though I will have to buy one sooner. Currently my computer is working again, but if it stops, I will not be able to use the Internet or read FreewayTalk or even use Freeway. I have been frantically burning CDs in order to save everything while I can. If everything goes quiet at this end you will know that something has happened. I don’t think I’d better shut down my computer as I usually do.

If that model can boot from an external FireWire drive, buy one and clone your failing internal drive to it with Carbon Copy Cloner http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html or Super Duper. Then set you Mac to boot from that external drive instead of the internal, which you can then ignore. You’ll then also have everything on an external drive that you can plug into your new Mac when you get one.

David

David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK. HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk) email@hidden www.ivdcs.co.uk

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Dear FreewayTalk

Thanks DanJ and David Ledger for your replies. I looked through the System Profiler for my computer and it turns out that disk0s5 is the internal hard disk “Macintosh HD”. Anyway I bought a brand new Mac this afternoon, and it will be delivered on Monday. I hope this computer (iMac G3) will hold out till then.

Regards

Graham Smith Bury St Edmunds, UK

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