I've been having problems with my Pismo's hard drive for about a week; at random intervals (usually within 2 hours of usage, but sometimes longer) OS X reports that it can't write anything to disk. Terminal commands report an I/O Error (nothing specific), and the system becomes completely unstable.

I can shut down the computer by holding the power button, and when I restart I get the flashing folder/mac logo, indicating that the startup disk is unavailable. If I turn off the machine for about 20 minutes, I can restart normally, and repeat the process.

I've reinstalled my entire system (corruption due to this problem was at one point was so bad that my entire partition table was trashed, and DiskWarrior and Norton Utilities were unable to recover my data), including a complete repartition and format.

I don't think that it's a problem with RAM or the CPU, since I'd be seeing much more erratic behaviour. I can only suspect either the hard drive is faulty (it's a 4 month old IBM TravelStar 40GB), or the hard drive controller.

I've googled extensively, and haven't been able to find any reference to this problem. It's worth mentioning that I've encountered the same problem in OS X 10.2.8 and MacOS 9.2 (with all system updates installed).

Any ideas? The hard drive is still under warranty, but I can't wait the month for an RMA, and don't want to buy a new drive unless I'm sure that the drive is the problem...

It sounds like the hard drive. I'd use the warranty on it.

-Bradley
POWERBOOKMEDIC.COM