Came home and worked my G4 Cube Mac restore magic.. or at least attempted.
David graciously transferred it from precious homewares and linen storage space remover to my willing hands when he invested in a Mac Mini some time ago. Since then it has been in my Mom's domain operating as her computer for email, banking, cute shortbread receipts and the such.
Despite its beauty and influence upon more successful Apple products, like the Mac Mini, the cube is like a Mac born with Cystic Fibrosis or severe scoliosis of the back. Once it hits its 30 and 40s in computer years it starts to take a much anticipated nose dive. The power tends to conk out with larger rattles of its deliciously cubic chassis. The DVD drive prefers not to eject disks as beautifully presented slices of toast as before. The USB powered speakers tend to clip and surge the entire system power with loud music and high volume levels. But you can still remove the guts from the case with the sexy industrial push-and-pull rod. It still purrs and pulses the display and system light in perfect time over the much forgotten ADC display port.
I originally conceived it for Mom's 50-something empty nester lifestyle with her kitten Lucy.. but they likely were not a good home for this special computer. I have a suspicion the cat was laying on top of the cube's convection cooled top. Causing much havoc with the computer's boot process, starting and stopping any number of times. As a result the hard drive is all but a completely random algorithmic slurry of aborted sector writes.
I took the scenic route and tried to repair it with Disk Utility on my other Mac. But despite a promising log file it did indeed not correct the problem. Now I'm re-installing and trying a fresh install. Barring that I look into replacing the 40gb PATA IDE drive with something more spacious. What's that gonna cost? $70? Yay for commodity parts.
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