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Leopard Killed my Hard Drive - HEEELLLPPPPPP!!!

B

bhibbert

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Here's what happened:

  • Inserted Leopard DVD and clicked Install OSX
  • Mac restarted
  • Got to choose install disk and had a warning icon on the drive
  • Clicked the drive and got a message "This disk is not suitable please format using Mac OSX Extended (Journaled)"

Decided I did not want to reformat my drive at this point so clicked back, back, back until I got to the initial installer screen where it told me I could choose "Quit Installer" and choose my startup disk.

Did this and restarted. Waited 20 seconds and my mac just shutdown.

Tried booting from the DVD again to see what the hell was happening. Booted to the installer and this time chose "Disk Utility" to see if anything was up with my internal drive.

Ran "Verify Disk" and got told "Invalid Extent" and "Repair failed".

My internal drive will now no longer mount and I am totally screwed.

Any ideas? My Mac was working fine until I tried the Leopard install.

20" Intel iMac 2.0Ghz 2gb ram 250Gb HD
 
Same Here!!!!!

After about 10 hours of running leopard my macbook just died after a restart. I went into the disk utility on the leopard installer to find out that Macintosh HD had reported a fatal error and that SMART status was failing (all in bold red type)!!!! After 3 frustrating hours waiting at the genuiss bar, I found out my hard drive had to be replaced....FOR THE SECOND TIME!!!!! I hope you don't have the same fate as me.😡
 
Same problem

I thought I was the only one...after a couple of blue screens of death, my hard drive died. Couldn't be repaired. Had to buy a new one😡
 
I fixed it!!!

Used DiskWarrior to rebuild the drive directory. Funny thing is this all started because Leopard wanted to reformat my drive. After DiskWarrior had worked it's repairs, I ran the Leopard Installer again. This time everything went smoothly.

I performed an upgrade install and everything is great.

I would not be so quick to pay for a new hard drive and demand that the Genius bar run DiskWarrior on your disk before you hand over any cash for a new one (and of course lose your data).
 
same here. everything was good until i put the keychain update. after restarting i would hear the click of death and now i cant even login at all. now i need to buy an external drive and make apple replace my internal =\
 
I don't think Leopard killed it, it was about to go, and the extreme drive activity of an OS upgrade just finished it off.
 
yea. but the thing is that my hd was already replaced with the click of death a month ago.. seems strange that it will come back. and at the worst time too. midterms =\

now its time to pickup a new one and spend spend spend...
 
Sun Baked said:
I don't think Leopard killed it, it was about to go, and the extreme drive activity of an OS upgrade just finished it off.
Click to expand...

i find this really hard to believe, as the exact same thing happened to me and i just bought a new hard drive about 3 months ago
 
Gojulas895 said:
I agree for the most part, but even then, for a HDD to die under such conditions, it would have to be relatively old, 2 years of even the heaviest of use aren't enough to kill a good hard drive in my experience.
Click to expand...

While newer drives are less likely to crash than older drives, there certainly is no guarantee that even a 1 day old drive won't crash, and to suggest that any drive failure in a less than 2-year old drive must be Leopard's fault is just plain wrong. Drive failure rates are measured using Mean Time Between Failure, and there are no bookends on those measurements.

The real rule is that drives never fail at a convenient time. And, so far, in this thread and others, it appears that these are software, not hardware, problems, mostly related to the type of pre-Leopard format on the drive. I wouldn't buy a new drive unless you are sure it is a hardware issue, after a visit to the Genius Bar.
 
Oh dear. Me too. Help?

Hmm, same thing just happened to me, just like you describe.
Now when I power my computer up, it just turns itself off again.

Any ideas how I get out of this black hole??
Where do I get this 'diskwarrior', and how do i run it in my present state?
Any way to get my tiger back?

Help appreciated!

ps - the nearest genius bar is about 10000 miles away.
 
Died too!!

Blue screened at install. ejected Leopard install disk and it restarted. All seemed ok, but wasnt able to put computer to sleep. All items on dektop would disappear and just background screen was there. Dock would still appear and even ran safari okay. tried relaunching finder, ng. Checked software update and there was the Log-in update, which i downloaded. upon restart i got the set-up wizard. went through it and upon completeing it set-up wizard starts again and again. going to try disk utility then re-installing.
 
Age...

Age has nothing to do with how long a drive will last...

I had a brand new Maxtor SATA drive that died within a month. I mean D.E.A.D. No spin, no index, nothing. Maxtor (pre-Seagate buyout) sent me a drive about 20% larger than the dead one so I was somewhat happier but age has nothing, less than nothing to do with drive longetivity.

I've seen drives in servers that have lasted 10 years! I've seen PC drives that haven't lasted days.

Backup, backup, backup. Do RAID if you can. Hope for the best...
 
Maui said:
Drive failure rates are measured using Mean Time Between Failure, and there are no bookends on those measurements.
Click to expand...

MTBF is just an mildly educated guess that assumes a number of things like temperature, vibration, humidity, power, etc... If you keep a drive running and cool, it should work very well for a number of years.

There have only been rare instances where programs caused a drive failure and it was usually that the drive didn't 'fail' but where the software caused random data to spray across the drive in the area were the OS stores the lookup tables for the drive. I suppose that if someone were to write software to cause 'jitter' in the head mechanism on a continuous basis, you might be able to cause a hardware failure, over time...

Drives are generally very stable and safe, but Murphy is an optimist and sh-t has been known to happen...
 
Gojulas895 said:
I agree for the most part, but even then, for a HDD to die under such conditions, it would have to be relatively old, 2 years of even the heaviest of use aren't enough to kill a good hard drive in my experience.
Click to expand...
A hard drive can fail at any time. It doesn't "have to be" a certain age for it to fail. It's accepted wisdom that there's a "bathtub" graph of failure rates (ie. very young and very old drives will be more likely to fail) but even that's disputed, and that doesn't mean you can ever say that's it's impossible for a drive to fail.

People are very good at picking out patterns and seeing links, but that means we often get things wrong. Someone does an OS upgrade and immediately gets a HDD failure, and assumes the upgrade caused the failure. Maybe it did, but considering the random nature of HDD failures, it's more likely to be coincidental.

For those getting "blue screens", maybe this will help - http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306857
 
My HDD story

I had bought a new internal hard drive to have time machine run on instead of on my external. I used the new drive as the main and my old drive as TM. After the initial install, which went easy and with out problems I started having trouble and decided to reinstall. From that point on the HDD wouldn't erase fully then wouldn't even show up. I just thought in was a bad drive and took it back to Best Buy and had them replace it. I've had problems installing but finally got it installed and everything moved.
 
So far I only saw 1 report of a SMART failure after the update, which is a lot considering the number of MR members. But a big torrent download may do the same thing.

It is a damn good idea to run fsck/Disk First Aid and also run repair permissions before an OS update.

While a marginal drive can be killed during an update due to the stress impulse, so can a marginal catalog/file structure.

The update should not kill that structure, unless it crashes during an update. But it can easily push an ill maintained file structure into failure.

But SW can also cause crashes, especially if they are login items or OS hacks left in. Though safe boot may get around those.
 
Uh ohhh

I have a :apple:powerbook G4 PPC and I had Leopard for about two weeks, i tried to use time machine to backup my files and it froze near 99% so I had to restart only to find out, oh hey, my Harddrive doesnt exsist! Nice. Took it to the Genius Bar and they said my HD was burnt out and I'd have to get a new one. Out of warrenty, it would cost 310$ (before taxes). Two weeks later I get it back, I use to have 100G HD but they gave me 120G, and they also gave me a new battery. Still sucks I lost everything. They're also suppose to put the same OS you had prior to the problem, my repair order said OS 10.5, but I got it back with 10.4 so I'm thinking maybe they know leopard has a problem.
 
Well to get the facts straight. http://storagemojo.com/?p=378 Just to point out a couple of the main graphs. http://storagemojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/utilization_afr.png <this shows how large amounts of work in the first 3 months make the drive MUCH more likely to drive. So reformatting the disk(zeroing the disk) and installing a new OS would really contribute to this, but thats if the drive is a dud in the first place. Also, http://storagemojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/afr_age.png Shows how drives are more likely to fail in the first 3 months vs after they are a year. Then the chance of failure increases dramatically.

So in summary yes 10.5 installs can "kill" drives....but its only triggering a disaster waiting to happen. It would have happened anyway. A 10.4 install would have done the same thing.
 
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