[DM-MUG] Reinstall or copy from clone.

[Ray Bowler]

15" iBook 640  MG memory, 20 MG HD running OS 10.2.8

Any help and advice for the following would be appreciated.

I have been having a problem with my wife's iBook the last couple of 
days. Saturday the screen did not wake up and I needed to restart. It 
restarted with a blinking question mark. Attempting to restart from 
an external firewire worked. I have had several restarts with the 
blinking question mark. Then it was OK. The next day it froze and I 
had trouble restarting.  I have used Disk Warrior and it repaired a 
system problem, I have had fsck -y report a problem and had to run it 
a second time to get the ok. More of a problem is that it will 
sometimes not restart, not even give me a good bong but it sounds 
like either the CD or the HD is running.

I took it to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store and the first time he 
tried it there was no response. The second time a white screen with 
some text appeared.
Then it rebooted. They ran all of the diagnostics available and all 
hardware seemed fine.In the store it began to restart fine and it has 
done so several times since. He suggested that we could send it in 
for repair and they could test it more than he could but they might 
not be able to reproduce it. He felt that there was a possibility 
that it might be system software on the HD causing the problem. It 
could also be caused by the intermittent failure of a hardware part 
but it could be a problem to find the part.

Two other options to try if it is a system problem:

1. An alternative would be to erase the HD and reinstall from the 
original disks then do all of the upgrades and reinstall all third 
party apps. and copy the personal files  from a clone made Saturday 
when it all started.

2. Boot from the clone made Saturday, erase the HD and clone the 
backup to the HD.  like this one but if some of the system files are 
the problem then nothing would be solved.

The second would be my preference but I am also tempted to just 
assume that the problem is fixed, backup the couple of files which 
she updates daily and see what happens.



-- 
Ray

Des Moines, IA Mac Users Group
Fourth Tues of the month.
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