Hard Drive failure - your help is needed!

I'm sorry to bear bad news, but....

Your hard drive has a mechanism called SMART that is designed to predict when the hard drive is near physical failure and warn you. Usually this is what these messages are about -- that your drive is about to / has died. This kind of msg doesn't usually come up for soft problems with the drive. If there is something like bad tables or sectors, Disk Utility should usually let you either try to repair or reformat when you boot off a different drive.

I think basically the bottom line is that you may have to replace the drive. Are you still under warranty? If so, march in and make them do it for you. A hard drive on such a recent PB should not be failing -- although statistically it happens sometimes....

It's weird that so many people are posting hard drive failure stories right after getting Tiger though. There have been at least half a dozen in the two weeks-ish since Tiger came out. Odd.

Yeh, I second that; seen a lot more Hard Drive failures than normal - although surely a software program couldn't physically cause any damage to the drive?

Try and backup, but it looks like trip to the Apple store genius Bar it may be - they might be able to help you?

Yeh - I third that!

Mine failed last week. It was on a brand new G5. I called Apple and they wanted me to take my whole mac to an AppleCentre. I know it is the HD because I got the same message as above.

After zeroing the hard drive 3 times and then re-installing Tiger it made no difference - it would install the software, boot up to the desktop but then I couldn't open any apps....

I am beginning to think something else may be going on here seeing there are a few more users with the same problems.

Funny thing was that disk utility only reported the fault once and after re- installing it was ok when I ran it again. I then ran SMARTReporter - it told me the drive was failing for sure.

I also ran the Apple hardware test and no problem was found in any area including the HD

Weird huh?
aussie_geek

This does not sound good for Tiger.............

Oh well it happens,,,,just have to make sure to back up...although I have an 80GB HDD that is full but with no backup