I bought a brand new MacBook Pro 17" from the Apple Store in Glasgow in June. Lately it's been giving me a lot of freezes and spinning beach balls. Since I just "cloned" my 2 year old iMac onto it when I got it (using Firewire), I guessed it just needed a clean up, as there was effectively 2 years worth of apps, stuff, etc, on there.
As I have a full Time Machine backup, I thought I'd do an Erase & Install, formatting the drive first. I did this, and things didn't improve.
The next thing I did was use Tech Tool to test the drive. It started off saying "4 hours remaining", but over the next few hours it found dozens of bad blocks, and the remaining time just kept increasing. I gave up and canceled the test at 66 bad blocks and 24 hours remaining and thought "the drive is goosed".
I did some Googling and someone suggested actually formatting the drive and zero-filling it, to try write over the bad blocks. I got my Mac Install DVD, booted from it, and ran Disk Utility to erase the drive and do a 7-pass fill. I did this overight last night, took 12 hours on a 500GB drive, and today I reinstalled OS X completely cleanly, not from a Time Machine backup.
So now I have a totally "as new" factory-settings mid-2010 17" i5 MBP. I installed Tech Tool, ran the disk scan again, and it completed in 4 hours and found 22 bad blocks.
Apple Store Glasgow have told me it'll be at least 7 days to get it fixed if it is indeed faulty, as they have a huge back log of work. It's also really awkward for me to get to the Apple Store, let alone twice (once for drop off, once for pick up). If I get Apple Care to do it via courier, I'll be without it even longer.
If that's what I have to do, fair enough, but before I do, does it seem to you guys like a faulty drive?
Cheers
As I have a full Time Machine backup, I thought I'd do an Erase & Install, formatting the drive first. I did this, and things didn't improve.
The next thing I did was use Tech Tool to test the drive. It started off saying "4 hours remaining", but over the next few hours it found dozens of bad blocks, and the remaining time just kept increasing. I gave up and canceled the test at 66 bad blocks and 24 hours remaining and thought "the drive is goosed".
I did some Googling and someone suggested actually formatting the drive and zero-filling it, to try write over the bad blocks. I got my Mac Install DVD, booted from it, and ran Disk Utility to erase the drive and do a 7-pass fill. I did this overight last night, took 12 hours on a 500GB drive, and today I reinstalled OS X completely cleanly, not from a Time Machine backup.
So now I have a totally "as new" factory-settings mid-2010 17" i5 MBP. I installed Tech Tool, ran the disk scan again, and it completed in 4 hours and found 22 bad blocks.
Apple Store Glasgow have told me it'll be at least 7 days to get it fixed if it is indeed faulty, as they have a huge back log of work. It's also really awkward for me to get to the Apple Store, let alone twice (once for drop off, once for pick up). If I get Apple Care to do it via courier, I'll be without it even longer.
If that's what I have to do, fair enough, but before I do, does it seem to you guys like a faulty drive?
Cheers
