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Mac Help Anyone??


A less presumptuous name.

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So I have a 6 year old G5 iMac. Basic specs, nothing fancy, and running Leopard. Comcast, our Internet Provider, was being stupid yesterday (again). To fix our internet, they threw us through a bunch of loops. Long story short, the G5 no longer works online. When it turns on, it gets all huffy and the gray startup screen lasts for like, 5+ minutes. After it turns on, a weird noise comes from the back, on the other side from the optical drive; I'm pretty sure it's the Hard Drive.

 

When I try to go online (with a direct line to the modem, Comcast says our router is causing interference...) Firefox immediately gives me the "server not found, make sure you're connected to the internet" error. Obviously, the internet is working for my laptop, using the same line to the modem. Any ideas about what's going wrong? Is it finally time to replace the 6 year old monster?

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Comcast uses a retarded MAC address binding scheme with their modems. It will only work when connected to the first device connected when it's turned on. You will need to reset the modem (There should be a button on it. You may need a ball-point pen or a pin to push it) and connect it to the iMac. You will need to do the same thing each time you connect it to something else. You should really look into getting a new router.

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Hmph, I haven't had trouble switching between things before. I switched the modem from our old netgear router to our new Belkin (which should work, its brand new) without a problem, and there was no problem switching it to my laptop. Like I said, the router is new and shouldn't be causing any problems. The only reason the person at Comcast said it was the router is because it's a Belkin ...

 

And any insights on the strange noise from the hard drive?

 

[EDIT] I plugged the router back in, hooked it up to the modem, reset everything, and got the network back up and running. Everything seems fine. Besides comcast being stupid, I don't think the internet is much of a problem. I'm still worried about the computer itself.

 

I have an appointment at the local macstore tomorrow. My dad and I are going to see if they know what's up with the computer. We'll probably end up getting a mac mini if we can convince my mom both that a computer is a necessity (duh) and that windows sucks (we don't even know how to protect it from viruses...)

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Hard drives can make strange noises when they are searching for files and have trouble finding them. Lots of motor noises and it frantically moves the drive head around.

 

Worse is if the noise persists that the drive motor is having problems and may need repair. Be sure to have it backed up so you don't have to pay to extract files from it.

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Uggh, my drive seems to be fine now. I ran a few diagnostics (Alsoft DiskWarrior and the Apple Hardware Test), and everything seems to be fine. Now if only I could fix my external drive. It's tripling things. When I add up the sizes of the three big files on it, it's about 32 GB. The drive, however, things it has 96 GB used. Mac is letting me down! (Even though the external isn't a mac)

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Is there perhaps a separate Trash folder on the external drive? If so, it may need emptying — it may be full of a lot of stuff you thought you had deleted. This is usually the reason my little USB sticks show up as full, anyway.

 

To be more specific with how it works on the USB sticks: the on-board Trash folder is hidden (.Trash), so you don't see it in the Finder. It empties, though, if you do the normal Empty Trash while the USB stick is mounted. I've had no similar trouble with our network-attached drive, but then I haven't ever deleted much from it.

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Deleting files is as easy as dragging the files to the trash and emptying it before you remove the device. Just to check and make sure this was working, I deleted my archived copy of Diablo II and, sure enough, 2gigs came back. What's all this about invisible files, though? My flash drives sometimes show files on a windows machine that are invisible on my mac, but 64 gigs of it? And how can I check to see if there are any of them?

 

[EDIT] I found out how to find the invisible files. I just can't see how I have over 60 GB of invisible files in the main menu of the drive.

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Disk Utility told me that it was formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I'm guessing that this is similar to what you mentioned. When I replaced my Hard Drive a while back, that's the format I used. Since it was already in that format, I just reformatted the drive in the same way. It's working fine so far. Disk Utility offers Mac OS Extended in four forms: basic, journaled, case sensitive, and case sensitive+journaled. My laptop (running 10.4.something) also offers one other, I think it's HFS+. I'm not sure how these compare to the windows equivalents, but I don't use windows, so I'm not worried smile

 

[EDIT] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_Extended

 

It turns out HFS+ is Mac OS Extended. I love Wikipedia!

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