Trouble with two hard drives including SMART failure

Question

About a week ago my mac mini g4 that I've had for less than 3 years, crashed while I was using itunes and playing music off an external usb drive.
As a result there has been trouble with both drives:
*Internal hard drive failure:*
The internal drive would not boot and reported a fatal hardware error, with a SMART failure. Interestingly, when I start up the computer as a firewire target and run the same Disk Utility program, it does not report the fatal error. I was able to reformat this drive and it seems to now be booting and running fine.
*External hard drive failure*
The external hard drive worked intermittently and then died completely a few days later, where it is now unable to mount it at all.
Does this mean I have two failed hard drives? The internal one seems to work fine and has for over a week, even though it still says there was a S.M.A.R.T. failure. When Disk Utility says there was a hardware failure, it prevents me from running the verify/repair functions. Is it possible that the external drive failure was somehow attributed to the internal drive?
I think it is also strange that when I run the Disk Utility using firewire target, the internal hard drive tests fine.
The message I get is:
"This drive reported a fatal hardware error to disk utility. If the drive has not failed completely, back up as much data as you can and then replace it with a working drive."
and at the bottom it says:
"S.M.A.R.T. status: failing"
Meanwhile it works just fine and my other external drive has failed altogether.
I normally wouldn't question this error message, but the fact that the other drive failed more completely at around the same time, and that the error message doesn't show up when I run the disk utility on the internal drive via firewire makes me wonder if there are other factors. It's also just frustrating that I may need to replace both.
Other things I have done is run the Apple Hardware Test, and everything passed. I also tried a PMU reset, and that didn't help.
Should I just replace the internal hard drive or should I look for other problems?
I appreciate any advice on this.
Message was edited by: biz123

Answer 1

I'm not aware of any firmware update for the PPC minis - I've not had any with either of my own that I recall.
Of course future reliability is something you can never really check or fully assess, but the fact the system passes the hardware test tells us that the components which could have been responsible and which are not fairly easy to replace (the logic board, disk controller, PMU are all healthy. RAM could be a problem because the hardware test is not all that capable at revealing RAM issues, but it is also not likely to be the cause of this kind of problem. The PSU is obviously suspect to some degree, but is also replaceable.
While it's not common to suffer multiple drive failures, the fact one was active and the other could easily have been paging would account for the result if either failed in that situation. Bad luck and not easy to reproduce if you tried, but not inconceivable.
The fact that the internal rendered up your files while in FW target disk mode tends to indicate that the reason it wouldn't boot from that drive was not that the drive itself was trashed, but that the drive crashed during use - a circumstance which often creates catalog and file problems, and can certainly cause the system to fail in locating the MacOS install to boot from. In that situation, unless there is physical damage to the drive, it typically can be re-used with a reformat and reinstall, since of course that corrects the kind of catalog/file issues that this sort of crash typically causes. It would be expected to report 'verified' for SMART status though.
There are a few reasons why a damaged external might not appear in Disk Utility, or refuse to mount, some of which are broad;ly similar - a crash causing file or catalog issues. The fact it was FAT32 would complicate the matter to a small degree since if the allocation tables weren't visible to the Mac due to corruption, the system wouldn't have any way to mount the drive. That said, while it would likely be visible to a PC, and may even render up files in data recovery, it wouldn't be reusable itself without a reformat, and could well produce I/O errors in the process. It would usually be amenable to reformatting though it might also need repartitioning depending on the damage done. The overheating you mention may be an indicator of a fault, or it may be that the drive is being pushed to all 3 read attempts with each data block - that would cause it to work very hard! If you have rescue the data you think you can get off it, I'd suggest you try a reformat. If that fails, use a utility such as FDISK to delete all the partitions and recreate them, then try formatting again.
In terms of iTunes, any version will work, including 7.6. If music is stored on the external and that is USB connected, that would count for some speed impediment since iTunes is fairly cpu intensive, and the USB bus is also highly variable in performance, depending on CPU activity. But no, there is nothing in the latest version of iTunes that would cause a PPC to suffer such performance problems in itself, so you can use that quite safely. All are very cautious about this aspect of software design, since updates are often released to deal with stability or security issues, and must be usable for everyone.