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Is my HDD dead?

MacBH928

MacBH928

macrumors G3
Original poster
May 17, 2008
9,159
4,183
I swapped my original HDD from my late 2008 macbook unibody with a larger WD one. Any one I kept the old one for backs up every few months.

I got it out today and connected it to the computer. The HDD partition would show up, I can click it and see whats inside it but soon it will eject itself and ask me for a password . I have a master password that I use, so I did use it but it didn't work.

I can hear snapping sounds in the HDD. It clicks. Any one know what this might be?

I have doubts the HDD died because it only has been in use about 3 years and then hardly used for backups. It worked flawless last time I used it. I do not recall dropping it or anything like that.
 
FreakinEurekan said:
Not a good sign. Try erasing it in Disk Utility but my guess is it's a goner.
Click to expand...

Why did it die? It really didn't have much use. My 2002 iMac survived from '02 until '09 (almost 7 years) of super heavy use. This one hardly got light use for 2 or 3 years.

I will try erasing.
 
HDD's have moving parts, and it seems to be fairly common to get one that is defective.

I have a lot of experience with storage, but not specifically on OS X.. If it's ejecting itself maybe it's hitting some sort of error? That kind of thing shows up in syslog, at least in Linux. But that would likely mean that it is in fact trying to die.
 
MacBH928 said:
Why did it die? It really didn't have much use.
Click to expand...

That's what hard drives do - they die, unpredictably. I've had disks last 10 years, I've had them die in a month. When I buy a drive I try to go for ones with a 5 year warranty, even if it costs a little more.
 
I retried working with my HDD.

This time the password worked, no clicking(snapping) noises, I did erase the HDD. I did a verify disk, everything is ok. Nothing seems to be wrong with it any more.

Any idea what happened? Is it possibly bad encryption? because its encrypted
 
MacBH928 said:
I retried working with my HDD.

This time the password worked, no clicking(snapping) noises, I did erase the HDD. I did a verify disk, everything is ok. Nothing seems to be wrong with it any more.

Any idea what happened? Is it possibly bad encryption? because its encrypted
Click to expand...

From the noise and symptoms you described in your first post, you have a bad drive. You likely just temporarily revived it by erasing.

If you have data on there you want to keep, I would copy it to another drive and toss that one in the trash.
 
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