Hard drive failure immediately following 10.4.6 install

Question

The Apple Discussions have been such a great help to me over the years. Wanted to add my experience to the forum in case it helps someone.
Background – 15” flat-panel iMac with 1GB RAM and 60GB ST360020 Seagate hard drive running 10.3.9. The hard drive was seldom spun down in the 4 years since machine was acquired. Regular maintenance with Disk Warrior and occasionally TechTool Pro. DW would always report that S.M.A.R.T. parameters were okay, but TTP consistently reported one obscure parameter was at threshold limit. Sorry I didn’t keep the specific parameter info to give. I remember concluding it was innocuous when I checked into it a few years ago.
My goal was to do a clean install of 10.4.6. I wanted to make sure the disk was still in good shape, and prior to the install I made two external clones with SuperDuper!. I booted from one of the clones and used Disk Utility (still in 10.3.9) to erase the iMac’s internal HD. I choose the “write zeros” option because I wanted to be extra certain that any bad spots would be caught and mapped out. When the reformat was finished I used DW to check the drive one more time. All was well.
Immediately after successfully installing 10.4.6 I rebooted (so now operating from internal HD again), opened Disk Utility and ran Repair Permissions. It ran for ~5 minutes with no messages, then the messages
Invalid key length
Volume check failed
and stalled (blue progress bar pulsing but no progress).
The system was extremely (but not totally) unresponsive. I used Force Quit from the Apple Menu to leave Disk Utility, then put a DW disk (3.0.3 for Tiger) into the optical drive. Restarted and used C key after chime to boot from DW. Click on DW’s “rebuild” button and within moments it put a message in parentheses beneath the progress bar saying something like
(slow due to disk malfunction)
DW stalled. I was able to quit DW but the system didn’t auto reboot so I forced shutdown with the power button. I then booted with the Tiger install disk and launched Disk Utility. I ran Repair and got the same messages
Invalid key length
Volume check failed
I had to hard shutdown. I booted again and pressed Option after the chime to make sure the install disk was selected as the boot drive. I commenced the process and this time choose Erase and Install (thus using the 10.4.6 software to erase/format the HD) in case there was any hidden incompatibility from using 10.3.9 to format the disk the first time.
After successful install I repeated all of the above procedures with Disk Utility and DW. Results were the same.
After reading the forums more deeply, I concluded that the HD was unrecoverable.
My point in relaying all of this is because there are numerous posts indicating a similar problem. Perhaps 10.4.6 is more stringent about disk operating tolerances. It seems too much coincidence for the drive to fail in this manner at just this time.
Rather than try harder to debug the problem, I decided to replace the drive with something that was faster and higher capacity. That was fun, but a different thread!
-sailhome

Answer 1

Hello,
It is also possible that all the extra activity just finally pushed it over the edge.
I remember when I upgraded to Windows 95. I had a machine who's hard drive was perfectly reliable, and had never given me a single problem. Absolutely no indication of trouble.
Windows 95 installed fine. And, then when the computer restarted, the hard drive completely died (as in not functional at all).
I remember thinking that Windows 95 killed my drive. But, with an electronics background, I knew that wasn't true.
The drive was dead, and no amount of messing with it (regardless of operating system) would revive it.
It was just the timing of it.
It felt like Windows 95 killed it. But, it was just it's time.
I got a new drive, and Windows installed and worked for years afterwards.
Sometimes things just happen.