hey, i know first hand whaet this is… bad ram… bad ram writes bad data.
it can be easily intermittent, like if a single chip on the stick is causing problem… i seem like a no-body, reviving an old post, but trust me, i make a living on that type of things… save yourself some trouble, replace the ram… you probably already did, since the corruption probably cam back… data corruption can’t cause the 3 beeps, they ARE reliable (one of the only things that still are now-adays) just hoping i can save you another major headache… they replaced your drive for nothing, it was fine, corruption was caused by bad ram… they always overlook the ram…
run the apple hardware test on your computer if it’s not too late, you’ll get ram errors, i bet you 10$…

Good luck, take care, have fun, and try to e-mail me what happenned

Is it possible that they never actually replaced your drive and simply reloaded it?

@ Brock

Is the iBook’s firmware up to date?

James

I suspect permission corruption, which got mirrored to the time machine, and when restored, had the same corrupt permissions.

Did you try running a permission fix after a restore from time machine ?

I bet Genius Paul knew this would happen and has already booked you a new appointment.

I have to wonder what is happening here. James I want to be clear that I think that this is in no way your fault.

Why does your MBP do the three beeps if there is no problem with the ram? Why was it providing this warning code prior to the repair? You were told it was a problem with your harddrive, but this doesn’t explain why you got the ram error beeps (the ram error code and the harddrive are unrelated). Your harddrive has been replaced, but you are once again getting the error beeps and system lockups. Your computer was NOT fixed.

I am bringing this up because I believe there is a false perception that computers are repaired when we think they are.

My girlfriend has an ibook that has had intermittent problems like this. The harddrive has been replaced thrice by the “Geniuses” at the San Fran apple store (for the record anyone who is a self-proclaimed genius: clearly is not.) It still shuts itself off at a whim, only to ignore repeated attemps to turn it back on. It also functions like a desktop, in that it cannot run on its battery, and must be plugged in. Any attempt to power on without the powercord plugged in, or to disconnect the cord while in sleep or in full operation is met with a harsh loss of power. At one point it only worked if you pinched the left side of the base of the ibook and tilted the book to a 45 degree angle.

I’ve found the folks at the genius bar to be lacking somewhat in technical expertise, not as bad as best buy mind you, but if even I can understand that the computer powering itself off is not a harddrive issue (especially after it has been replaced twice previously) shouldn’t the experts know that?

My theory, which I believe will prove itself to be true (over the next several months) is that James’ MBP problems are endemic to his sepcific unit. Further visits to the genius bar for repairs will result in new components replacing old ones, but the errors he experiences will continue to occur until he has a completely new unit.

My wife has had a similar number of problems with her Mac portable. People also tell her that it must be her fault since things like this don’t happen on Macs.

Apple also replaced her hard drive. Maybe they are just having supplier problems.

I also wondered whether there could be problems related to programs running on the Windows side. Could an antivirus program on the Windows side be causing unanticipated problems for the Mac side?

Got MS?

Bwuhahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!

Woadan

“The odd part is, Time Machine doesn’t appear to be block-based. There’s no reason that it should end up writing bad metadata to the volume.”

Exactly what I was trying to say!

I have to disagree on Time Machine causing this: even if the files were corrupted it is extremely unlikely that Time Machine would reproduce the same problem on the new drive. Firstly, Time Machine would not be able to read corrupted sectors on the old drive just like MacOS wasn’t, so it would either skip them or report the error. Secondly, Time Machine wouldn’t corrupt volume structure as part of the restore process since that data cannot be just restored from the old drive, it’s rebuilt by the MacOS as the files are added so it’s unique to your new drive.

Statistics suck, and people are notoriously bad at reading into them.

If Apple has a 1% failure rate on MBP hard drives, then out of a million drives, 10,000 will fail. The funny part about that is, it doesn’t matter who gets one of those 10,000. I could get none. Someone else could get one. James could get 10!

*If* it’s a second failing hard drive, it’s not necessarily James’ fault, unless he’s baking his MBP prior to yanking the hard drive, setting it atop a degausser for a few minutes, and then popping it back into his system.

Most likely, Time Machine copied some structures improperly, munged some permissions, and now he’s got to play catch up. I’d recommend that James fix permissions on his disk prior to running any more diagnostics.

(The odd part is, Time Machine doesn’t appear to be block-based. There’s no reason that it should end up writing bad metadata to the volume.)

I agree with Kevin. The issue was probably caused by the files in the backup already being damaged by the dying hard disk and restoring the damaged preferences and settings. If you had just brought back the data files then you may have found some documents that were damaged but not had the OS issues that you experienced.

Your old HDD may have been thrashing files for a while..possibly for a few backups prior to the repair. When you restored from the backup it just copied the bad files and structures over. Hopefully all is well now.

I like to blame the magnetic personalities of some users.

James, if you have an intermittent hardware failure somewhere other than your hard drive (lets say your RAM has a nasty spill every now and then) this could easily lead to a badly corrupted hard drive. If your hardware fails while your drive is being written to this can really mess the drive up, which could explain the second drive with similar problems.

I suspect it has more to do with pushing the gadgets to the limits, more so than the average user. I bang everything I use pretty hard but it’s hard to blame the user for disk errors.