iBook making funny grinding sound - any ideas?

[mondo joe]

My partner and I converted to Apple last year. My Powerbook is great, but his iBook is misbehabing:

Every now and then the whole thing just slooooows down almost completely, and makes this odd grinding sound. A few restarts seems to most often get things back in shape.

But I don't know enough about Macs to even guess what the problem could be. Can...you?

[politicat]

1. Is the fan coming on?

Do you get the spinning beachball of death?

[mondo joe]

2. Not sure - it's my patrner's iBook but I can check. Do you have

something in mind??

[politicat]

5. Yeah.... maybe.

fans can sound like they are grinding, especially if the processor is really cooking away at something - and you know the processor is cooking if the SBOD is up.

The other diagnostic is, when it's grinding, feel with the palm of the hand for where the grinding seems to be coming from - if it's the back, under the keyboard, it's probably a fan; if under the left hand rest, probably hard drive, if under right hand rest, look at optical drive.

Grinding generally means a mechanical issue - it's got to be fan, hard drive or optical drive.

[mondo joe]

6. I passed that instruction on. THANKS!!

[NV Whino]

3. Grinding sound is not good

Back up important files immediately and get your computer to the nearest Mac doctor. It sounds as if the hard drive is failing.

It may not be as bad as I'm intimating. It could be just a noisy CD drive. For some reason Mac CD drives tend to make lots of noise. But back up and get it checked out anyway.

[alfredo]

4. I would do as suggested, back up everything and get the

drive checked.

One thing that might be a good idea is to get a utility like MacJanitor. House keeping scripts usually take place in the middle of the night. Most people have their laptops shut down during those hours.

http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html

OnyX is very good.
http://www.titanium.free.fr/

[MalachiConstant]

7. sounds exactly like what happened when the hard drive crashed

on my powerbook. back up everything and get to an apple store would be my suggestion

[myomy]

8. That's also the sound you can get when starting from a CD

Surely you don't have a CD (orDVD) in your drive???