"Groundhog Day" Powerbook G3

[EriolGaurhoth]

Hey all,

I have a very unusual issue with my PowerBook G3.  It's a PDQ/300 with 512MB of RAM and a 128GB SSD. The system worked fine for a very long time, installed everything fine, was able to shutdown on command. After a system crash yesterday, whenever I boot up the mac and following the "your computer crashed..." disk check, the OS boots as normal, restoring all my windows the way they were before the crash, and all my files seem to be there, and can be opened just fine.

I proceeded to close these windows, delete a few files, and tried to restart.  Nothing happened.  So I pulled the plug.

When it rebooted, everything was still there, the same as it was before the crash!  The files I deleted from the desktop had returned, all my closed windows were re-opened exactly as they were before.  This time I tried to "shutdown" instead of restart...same problem, no response.  I let it sit for over an hour and it was simply my desktop screen with nothing clickable.  I pulled the plug again to hard reboot.

After I restarted, it was all back again, the deleted files, the windows, everything.  I tried a few more things:
- restarting with extensions off, still no ability to reboot/shutdown, still reboots to the same snapshot of the OS as before the crash
- restarting not from the HDD but from a restore disk.  The installer loads up, as does the drive, but again I can't reboot/shutdown, and rebooting again with no disk takes me to the same spot
- restarting and rebuilding the desktop file killed the pictures on my icons, briefly.  I say briefly, because it still wouldn't power down, and a hard reboot brought back my old desktop, old windows, old files, same as it was before
- I tried re-installing the OS, which threw me an error the 1st time and the 2nd time it appeared to reinstall properly.  Much to my dismay, it hung on the reboot attempt, and upon reboot, everything was once again as it was before.
- I pulled the hard drive and replaced it with a different one.  I attempted to reinstall the OS, and everything went smoothly this time, the install completed perfectly, according to the installer, and the system actually rebooted!  Only when I rebooted after the install, I get the "?" icon, as it doesn't seem to think I have an HDD installed.
- I put the old HDD back in, and just like "Groundhog Day", the disk was recognized and everything loaded exactly as if before: all my deleted files were there on the desktop, all my windows opened.
- I reset the PRAM (holding fn+ctrl+shift+power for 5 seconds).  The only different thing rebooting now was that the time was messed up, but otherwise, everything else remained unchanged.

I'm perplexed as to what could be causing this and am not sure what to check next to break the "Groundhog Day" cycle.  It could be an issue with the SSD/HDD, except that the system appears to read the old SSD fine but doesn't read new HDDs.  It might be a RAM issue, where it somehow reads properly but refuses to write to disk, but I'm not sure how that would also cause the system to never want to shutdown, unless a shutdown command somehow requires writing something to the disk?

If anyone has any ideas on this or has experienced similar issues, please let me know!

[ssp3]

- I reset the PRAM (holding fn+ctrl+shift+power for 5 seconds).

That's not resetting the PRAM. Correct procedure is cmd+opt+p+r.

Try bootable DiskWarrior or Norton CDs and see what they say.

[EriolGaurhoth]

Quick update to this: I pulled the RAM, replaced with completely new RAM (smaller RAM, only 1 64MB module). Still same results, other than system profiler showing the new lower RAM.  So I guess it's not the RAM...

[EriolGaurhoth]

- I reset the PRAM (holding fn+ctrl+shift+power for 5 seconds).

That's not resetting the PRAM. Correct procedure is cmd+opt+p+r.

Try bootable DiskWarrior or Norton CDs and see what they say.

Sorry I misspoke, I reset the power manager using that other method.  I also tried the cmd+opt+p+r, I let it "bong" about 3-4 times before releasing, it booted up but it still behaves the same way.  I'll have to run some diagnostics with those utility discs and see if they give me any more clues.

[EriolGaurhoth]

- I reset the PRAM (holding fn+ctrl+shift+power for 5 seconds).

That's not resetting the PRAM. Correct procedure is cmd+opt+p+r.

Try bootable DiskWarrior or Norton CDs and see what they say.

Sorry I misspoke, I reset the power manager using that other method.  I also tried the cmd+opt+p+r, I let it "bong" about 3-4 times before releasing, it booted up but it still behaves the same way.  I'll have to run some diagnostics with those utility discs and see if they give me any more clues.

Just finished running Norton Disk Doctor.  It found some "major errors" with damaged resource forks of some of my files, all were related to my installed Corel Graphics 8 program.  Other than that there were a handful of "minor errors" that were fixed.  It otherwise found nothing wrong with the volume itself.  My next course of action is probably to run a MacTest Pro CD to see if it can do some hardware tests other than the disk.

[Greystash]

I have no idea how the Finder handles these sorts of functions, but I wonder if it's unable to store these changes and hangs at shut down because it's still trying to do this in the background. What sort of SSD are you using? Are you sure is is 100% legitimate and that the capacity is "true". Also, what sort of adapter are you using with the SSD?

[ssp3]

Try trashing Finder preferences.

Also, any chance that your OS9 drive has been connected to OSX side of things recently? In target mode or otherwise.
I vaguely remember having very strange permission / sharing issues in OS9 years ago on a dual boot G4.

Corrupt disk driver might be another possibility. What formatting utility are you using?

Do these G3s have OpenFirmware? If so, try resetting everything there.

Check data transfer integrity with this tool:
http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=6744.0;attach=12193;image

[cyberish]

very interesting, thx ssp3 . is the "integrity tool" part of a "tool suite" ? which one?

[ssp3]

Hard Disk SpeedTools 3.6

[EriolGaurhoth]

So I think I figured out the culprit, unsurprisingly, was the SSD itself.  At least, partially.  I can't seem to explain the behavior of the PowerBook not wanting to recognize my standard IDE HDD drives (all legitimate travelstars, albeit from the era so their age might be causing some unrelated issues).  I was able to swap out for another SSD and it recognized, installed, and ran everything perfectly.  I ran some other tests with the questionable SSD outside of the Powerbook, and it seems that it will no longer write any form of data, be it new data or even deletion of old data.  it's just...frozen in time. This SSD is an older one and had been used before in another machine for quite a while, so perhaps it simply exceeded the number of allowable writes before it just stopped wanting to write.

The reason this was hard to discover using only era-appropriate Mac tools is that most software used for checking drive integrity almost never check the writing capabilities of the drive, for if the drive had some software-related corruption, it would simply show up when reading corrupted files and if there was hardware-level corruption, a hardware-failed HDD would likely neither read NOR write.  At least, I can't think of a circumstance where your standard magnetic IDE, SCSI, SATA, whichever drive would incur a hardware failure where reading data was perfectly possible and writing was not.

Furthermore, Mac OS 9 also has no real way to check for write errors outside of throwing errors when trying to install software, which upon further examination, was happening.  I kept getting errors when trying to install Adobe Premiere, and trying to save a game I was playing also errored.  But there were no errors when deleting files, and this might be a result of garbage collection not taking place at the point of deletion, but sometime later, perhaps when the system reboots (which would explain why it would always hang).  I also noticed that if I did nothing but delete a few files from the desktop and waited a while, they would randomly re-appear on the desktop, even when I'd already deleted them AND emptied the trash, probably an example of OS 9 trying to delete something, realizing it couldn't, and simply restoring the previous state.

The next step will be attempting to recover the files from the drive, if possible.  Thankfully it does still read and appears to properly transfer files to external media, albeit in small quantities, as I get crashes when I try to transfer too much.  I'd hate to see a drive with years worth of data and installations fail like this, but it's my fault for not doing a Retrospect backup in...well...retrospect.

[DieHard]

Your actually very lucky with your "frozen in time" drive as any data is easily retrieved.

After dealing with SSDs everyday in both Macs and PCs, the SSD failure rate is definitely higher than traditional spinners.  WD had a real bad run of luck and the SA510 Blue series is an absolute heartbreak.  I installed over 100 of the last year and had to RMA about 38 of them that went bad in less than 6 months of use. 
Also, many others are dying less than 2 years old... in this order from worst to better...

Worst to Better: (IMO)
1) Western Digital
2) PNY
3) Lexar
4) Crucial

As a side note, Samsung is definitely the absolute best (from my experience) although you gotta shell out the big bucks.  I can count on 1 hand the number of Samsungs that failed. I still have a ton of Spinning drives that are over 10 years old that can still pass a 3 HR extended drive diagnostic without issue.

I can never go back to a traditional spinner for my OS and current projects, but I am starting to think we were really handed a load BS about the reliability of SSDs that never really give a ton of warning before they die... at least the mechanics would slow down or throw out a SMART error, the SSDs, no so much

[ssp3]

The reason this was hard to discover using only era-appropriate Mac tools is that most software used for checking drive integrity almost never check the writing capabilities of the drive...

Not true. See my post above re. Intech Integrity tool. That's what I've been using in my 17" G4 1GHz firewire drive tests. ATTO ExpressPro-Tools ->Benchmark Volume will aso show if the drive fails to write - the red 'write' graph simply drops to zero.

[ssp3]

... the reliability of SSDs that never really give a ton of warning before they die... at least the mechanics would slow down or throw out a SMART error, the SSDs, no so much

DiskWarrior will issue a warning and so will DriveDx. DriveDx could be set to constantly monitor the drives. See example below. DriveDx is Intel, SL and up. For OSX PPC there is "SMART Utility" by Volitrans Software. Similar, but less informative than DriveDx. I am not aware of any SMART tools for OS9, but I do check all my SSDs with DriveDx in SL prior to moving them over to OS9 machines.

[EriolGaurhoth]

Your actually very lucky with your "frozen in time" drive as any data is easily retrieved.

I'm extra lucky that I've got a Quicksilver with several 2TB mechanical SATAs that I use for backups alone over networked Retrospect, I was just very neglectful of this drive in particular.  I won't make that mistake again.

[EriolGaurhoth]

... the reliability of SSDs that never really give a ton of warning before they die... at least the mechanics would slow down or throw out a SMART error, the SSDs, no so much

DiskWarrior will issue a warning and so will DriveDx. DriveDx could be set to constantly monitor the drives. See example below. DriveDx is Intel, SL and up. For OSX PPC there is "SMART Utility" by Volitrans Software. Similar, but less informative than DriveDx. I am not aware of any SMART tools for OS9, but I do check all my SSDs with DriveDx in SL prior to moving them over to OS9 machines.

This is very useful info for the future, thanks! I've used this SSD for years and to my knowledge it worked fine, I just think that overuse killed it.  I will check the new SSD with these tools just to be 100% certain it's in good working order before going crazy with reinstalling everything.

[ssp3]

Check the old one too, but re-format it first. I suspect it could be permissions issue.