how to test for a bad hd?

fowler.

macrumors 6502a

Original poster

Apr 18, 2004

585

0

Pasadena

• Apr 14, 2008

• #1

I have a feeling my hard drive is going. I'm getting the spinning beach ball quite often these days... and with 2 gigs of ram and a fairly recent fresh install (~6 months), it surely can't be either of those.

Is there any to test what's up with the hd? X-Bench?

 

Neil321

macrumors 68040

Nov 6, 2007

3,733

2

Britain, Avatar Created By Bartelby

• Apr 14, 2008

• #2

You could try going into disk utilities>first aid, verifying the disk,if something shows up there's a repair option

 

ert3

macrumors 6502a

Dec 10, 2007

802

0

• Apr 14, 2008

• #3

There is also the possibility that you inadvertently installed to many startup apps and they are dominating your system resources.

To that end if you are running a PowerBook you should know that universal binaries are rather clunky.

 

The Stig

macrumors 6502a

Nov 4, 2006

681

34

On the track

• Apr 14, 2008

• #4

Tech Tool

If you want to spent some money, try Tech Tool Pro. It is a great tool, and it will scan your HD and do a surface scan and read/write tests and then fix any problems on top of all the other stuff it does. It might have a demo version but I don't know.

See http://www.micromat.com/ for more information.

I'm in no way a partner with Micromat. I just bought the software and I really like it.

The Stig

 

S

steinlager

macrumors regular

Nov 2, 2007

126

0

• Apr 14, 2008

• #5

Are you running Leopard?

I'm not sure if this applies to Tiger as well, but try booting from the installation disc and select Disk Utility at the top. Do verify/repair disc and it'll tell you if you have problems. Worked for me when I had kernel panics during bootcamp partitioning.