My ebay nightmare - faulty disk upon arrival

Question

Just bought a 15" powerbook from an ebayer and unfortunately my experience has been, so far, less then happy. I have two PB 12" that I love and I bought this machine for a friend after convincing him, for months, of the merits of Macs. Got the machine and I'm having major disk problems. Luckily I don't have a data recovery issue since the machine is brand new.
First off, here are the specs:
Powerbook G4 15", 1Ghz, 768MB, 60GB HD
Model#: A1046
Apple Certified Refurbished Seriel: RM5100SLNRY (nowhere in the ebay listing did it mention that is was a refurb)
I live in Belize, Central America and I just received this powerbook from a solid seller off of ebay who claimed in his ad that the computer was in "good working condition". I truly hope this seller did not intentionally sell me something he knew would be DOA, but this remains to be seen. Sending the thing back to the US for repairs represents a HUGE pain in the ***.
Here is what has happened so far:
1) Opened PB for the first time. Seller claimed he was installing a fresh copy of 10.4.7, so I figured I just start right up instead of bothering with a fresh install myself.
2) First thing I noticed is that the chime took a full 10 seconds, the gray screen and apple take a full 12 seconds after the chime. Never does boot with regular startup, stuck on gray apple with no spinning wheel, just sits at the apple. This is very different from my two 12" PBs that both boot quickly and smoothly.
3) Decided to go directly to fresh install (full erasure), worked fine, zero errors or hangups.
4) Upon reboot, same thing, stuck at gray apple logo.
5) Reboot attempt into verbose mode - FAILED
6) Reboot attempt into single-user mode - FAILED
7) Reboot attempt into safe mode - FAILED (5/6/7 all get stuck on gray apple logo, have never been able to get into these modes)
8) Back into disk utlity, disk shows up fine
9) Ran verify/repair, each time it gives me different results
a) "repairing disk failed - cannot unmount"
b) "invalid sibling link"
c) Checking Catalog file -> Invaild Code Structure -> Volume Check failed -> Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
d) or it simply gives a clean bill of health
10) This is the weird part, the test is different almost every time I run it
11) dmesg is reporting the following lines at the end:
disk0s3: I/O error
12) When I run "sh /etc/rc", I get the following before the machine forces me to reboot.
registermach_bootstrapservers: bootstrap_register(): 1101 (repeated 10+ times)
Launching Crash Reporter
Crash Log shows nothing at all
13) Ran Diskwarrior, identified several errors, apparently "rebuilds" them. While running, gives the following error:
(Speed inhibited by disk malfunction)
PB will still not boot, nothing has changed.
14) Messed around with boot partition position/sizes, using disk utility. Created a 10GB "boot" partition and a put the remainder into "data"... reloaded OSX, again with the "FULL ERASE" option... now the machine will actually get into VERBOSE and SINGLE-USER modes, only to tell me "disk0s3: I/O error" once again. Now the spinning wheel comes on with all boot attempts, but still will not boot.
15) At this point, I ran Diskwarrior again, says "boot" partition is in use and it cannot rebuild...
16) Ran DW on "data", still giving the "speed inhibited by disk malfunction" error while running, many errors corrected
17) Ran DW on "boot", still giving the "speed inhibited by disk malfunction" error while running, many errors corrected
And in the end, it still doesn't boot... and I'm actually back to the original state with no diagnostic boot capabilities.
I'm sure I need a new drive, but you can imagine how ****** I am that was sold to me as a machine "in good working order"... I don't "blame" the seller, but this really *****... Because I am in Central America, getting a new drive and replacing it is NOT GOING TO BE FUN.
Any advice would be sincerely appreciated.
Powerbook(s)   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

You can use a program as Tech Tool Pro 4. It can install a bootable eDrive on your HD or you can read below.
From the Finder Help Menu:
Partitioning a hard disk:
Use Disk Utility to partition a disk into sections, or "volumes," each of which works like a separate disk. You might want to partition a disk so that you can have different versions of the Mac OS, or organize your information in a logical manner.
Partitioning a disk erases all the files on the disk. If you have any files on the disk you want to save, be sure to make a copy of them on another disk before you partition the disk.
You cannot partition the disk that you started up from. If you want to partition the startup disk, you must restart your computer using your Mac OS X Install disc, as described below. Because partitioning will erase your hard drive, you should back up your hard disk before proceeding.
To learn more about using Disk Utility, open Disk Utility, in the Applications/Utilities folder, and choose Help > Disk Utility Help.
To partition your startup disk:
Insert the Mac OS X Install disc and restart the computer.
When you hear the startup tone, hold down the C key until you see the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).
When the Installer appears, choose Utilities > Disk Utility.
Select your disk from the list, and click Partition.
Select how you want to partition the disk and any options you want, then click the Partition button at the bottom of the window.
Quit Disk Utility.
When the Installer opens again, you can install Mac OS X on one of the partitions.
If you want to use another disk as the start-up disk, choose Utilities > Startup Disk and choose it.
MJ