Could it be the Logic Board?

Question

The subject of this post is my son-in-law's G4 iBook 1.33 GHz. Last fall his HDD crashed, and he took it to a shop in S'Francisco, where they replaced the HDD. This spring, with minimal use in between times, the HDD seemed to fail again. He left the 'Book with me to see what I could do.
Here's what I have tried:
1. Run Repair Disk several times, and it finally came up as disk was successfully repaired. S.M.A.R.T. Status is Verified each time.
2. I set about to Reformat, zero, and re-install. However, the reformat stuck after the blue progress bar went about 1/4 inch of the 5 inches of so it needed to go.
3. I left it overnight and in the morning it had not budged a whisker.
4. I aborted the process when I saw it was not going anywhere and was warned that the disk might be inoperable, which it was already.
6. I restarted computer and attempted to Repair Disk again. This time I am completely unable to access the HDD to do anything with it,
5. After several days, I did the formatting again, both from the Tiger install Disk, and from my own Tiger backup on an external FW HDD. the reuslts are the same. I am able to format, but it will not zero the HDD. It comes back with a message about an unknown file format. Each time S.M.A.R.T. Status is Verified.
6. I have tried running DW on it and it won't go. I have run all the diagnostics and repairs TechTool Pro will do, but when I ask TTP to zero the HDD, it won't do it.
7. So I bit the bullet and decided to take the computer apart. I needed to get the serial # of the HDD, anyway, to get a replacement. I soon discovered that this thing ain't no Pismo when it comes to accessing the inernal HDD. If you have attempted this you will know I had to almost completely disassemble the computer.
8. I removed the HDD and placed it in a 2.5" FW enclosure, reformatted it and all that went very well.
9. I was so encouraged I decided to try to zero it out, and I have now completed zeroing out the HDD.
10. Piling success on succes I decided to go for the gold. I am now in the process of cloning a backup I made of his internal HDD, last fall, to the HDD in the enclosure.
It seems that the HDD itself is not the issue (so far anyway) I am guessing that whatever kind of driver or watchamacallit there is on the logic board is screwing up. Is that a reasonable guess? What else can I do the check this out? What next?
Thanks.
cornelius

Answer 1

It seems you've done quite a bit of troubleshooting and there's only so far people can help from online like this. Some of the tools, like the Apple Hardware Test may or may not detect a faulty ATA controller on the logic board. (The "shim" fix on some iBooks is related to the video card, not necessarily the ATA controller.) Since the hard drive does appear, that may be all the further the AHT tests, it may not do a file-copy type of test to see if the drive can be read and written to. (I'm not so sure about that, though.) The startup chime is an indication that the computer has passed some very basic hardware tests. It tests to see if there IS any kind of ATA bus so that there might be a hard drive or optical drive attached, it doesn't test for a drive itself. It's possible the AHT is only taking this a step further and testing the existence of a hard drive and the SMART status. This may not be enough for a test for your type of failure.
I think at some point you're going to have to decide how much time and money you're going to invest in repairing the iBook yourself. The online Apple store has a refurbished MacBook for only $999.
-Doug
(In San Francisco for the WWDC where I've temporarily edited my profile to include my e-mail)