Bad RAM causes hard drive crash?

October 3, 2006 12:17 PM

I think bad RAM crashed the hard drive in my ibook g4. How can I make sure it was bad RAM and not a more sinister problem?

I recently tried to upgrade the RAM in my ibook g4. Installation went fine, but when I started it up, nothing but the grey apple screen. I switched back to my original RAM and nothing. So I bit the bullet and took it to a repair place -- they fiddled with it and eventually tried rebooting my hard drive. Hey Presto, everything started up perfectly with no data loss or any other snags (with original RAM in)! So, I'm guessing the problem was bad, cheap RAM (I know I bought the right RAM 'cause I used Crucial.com to find what I needed but just bought it from a cheaper place). However, I want to make sure there is not a fatal flaw in my hard drive -- anything besides Disk Utility I can use to check this out? Also, could the reboot disk the repair guy used have been anything other than a standard reboot disk (seems too good to be true)?

posted by sievehead to computers & internet (7 comments total)

"Bad RAM" having anything to do with hard drive problems makes no sense to me. They aren't really related in terms of hardware failure and such.
posted by autojack at 12:23 PM on October 3, 2006

You could try DiskWarrior, but I agree with autojack that there's almost definitely nothing wrong with your hard drive. What you describe is a typical "bad RAM" scenario. Send it back to the supplier.
posted by mkultra at 12:26 PM on October 3, 2006

There's a very good Mac OS X memory tester here.
posted by jaimev at 12:35 PM on October 3, 2006

It's really hard to say since your terminology is weird -- I have no idea what "rebooting my hard drive" means. You reboot the whole computer, not a drive. So I have no idea what the repair guy actually did.

That said, I agree that your HD is probably fine.
posted by xil at 12:36 PM on October 3, 2006

Sorry, I'm not a power mac user. I did mean that the repair guy rebooted my laptop (from a cd). My understanding of an HD crash is that there is a high chance of losing data. So it seemed that restarting from a cd wouldn't have been able to bring back all my data, preferences, etc. yet there it all was.
posted by sievehead at 12:52 PM on October 3, 2006

Unless of course I did not suffer an HD crash. But I still don't understand why it was necessary to boot from a cd when the original (apple) memory was back in and is still working fine.
posted by sievehead at 1:04 PM on October 3, 2006

Rebooting doesn't mean what you think it means. You reboot your machine every time you turn it off and back on. Perhaps the repair guy used a bootable CD to start your laptop, instead of the internal hard drive. You can do this yourself with the OS X installation disc by having it in the computer before you turn it off. When you turn it on again, hold down the C key to boot the CD instead of the hard drive.

From the CD, you can run Disk Utility on the hard drive.
posted by odinsdream at 2:57 PM on October 3, 2006