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Snow Leopard Hangups - Bad Hard Drive?

jessep28

jessep28

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 8, 2006
380
0
Omaha, NE
I've got a 20" iMac with a 2.16 Ghz C2D processor, 2GB RAM and running Snow Leopard (10.6.7). I bought the computer new in late 2006. There is plenty of hard drive space left (196GB). The machine had no issues until last week.

Essentially last Friday I started experiencing a lot of hangups when using the machine. On a subsequent reboot, the dock completely disappeared and I could not recover it. Suspecting something became corrupted on the OS, I performed a simple erase on the Hard Disk, reinstalled the OS and restored my Time Machine backup. It seemed to resolve the problem.

A few days later, the symptoms returned. This time I repaired permissions and checked the hard disk, which came back okay. I also ran AppleJack with no success. It's not a user profile issue since the symptoms are evident on the new profile.

At this point I'm concluding the hard disk is going bad. Are there any tests I can run before I buy a new hard drive to install?

Thank you

Jesse
 
Last edited:
B

blevins321

macrumors 68030
Dec 24, 2010
2,768
96
Detroit, MI
Try the non-GUI FSCK.

Hold down Command + V when you push the power button to turn the computer on. When the screen turns black you can let go of the keys. It'll show its verbose startup sequence and eventually get to a point where it's prompting for commands.

Enter: fsck -y and press Enter.

It'll run through the file system check..and this may take awhile. It'll tell you if it finds anything and then automatically correct it. When it finishes, it'll put the command prompt back up. Rerun the command until it says that no changes were made.

Edit: When you're all done, type reboot and hit enter at the prompt. Your Macbook should then start back up normally.
 
jessep28

jessep28

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 8, 2006
380
0
Omaha, NE
Thank you for the suggestion. Running FSCK came back with non-repairable errors and now the machine won't boot into OS X. So, I'm going to just put a new hard drive in the computer.
 
B

blevins321

macrumors 68030
Dec 24, 2010
2,768
96
Detroit, MI
jessep28 said:
Thank you for the suggestion. Running FSCK came back with non-repairable errors and now the machine won't boot into OS X. So, I'm going to just put a new hard drive in the computer.
Click to expand...

Ah, sorry it turned out that way. And yeah, that's indicative of hardware sector failures. Good thing is though that the hard drive is one of the cheapest components to replace that goes bad.

Edit: Good for you keeping a Time Machine Backup :)
 
jessep28

jessep28

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 8, 2006
380
0
Omaha, NE
blevins321 said:
Ah, sorry it turned out that way. And yeah, that's indicative of hardware sector failures. Good thing is though that the hard drive is one of the cheapest components to replace that goes bad.

Edit: Good for you keeping a Time Machine Backup :)
Click to expand...

The funny thing about that is that I just finally got around to buying an external hard drive for Time Machine backups and the drive arrived this past Thursday. If my iMac started melting down on Thursday the 28th instead of Friday the 29th, this could have been a different situation. :)
 
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