Internal HDD - S.M.A.R.T. status 'bad'

Than back it up. What you cannot backup is so badly corrupted that you won't get it off anyway.
If you have enough backup space just create a second CCC backup in addition to the timemachine before you send it in.

I don't have enough timemachine experience. I only use it for Systemfiles and small stuff. I generally backup media by hand as in just copy it on different locations, because I like to use the backup drive as a media drive too. I doubt that a timemachine backup would be unrepairably corrupted. It will copy the files and they are even accessible without the backup routine. A risk may be system drive but that still works. Data you can either copy or not.

mgpg89 said:

My Mac has got 2 internal hard drives
- 115GB Solid State drive (contains OS X + apps)
- 1TB regular hard drive (contains music, movies, photos)

Recently I've been getting error messages when moving big files around on my 1TB drive, so I decided to run Disk Utility. Apparently, the disk's S.M.A.R.T. status is 'bad'.



What are my options? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. I have a Time Machine back-up, but don't quite know how to check if it's actually a 'good' back-up. Wouldn't like to get a new drive only to find out the back-up was corrupted as well.

P.P.S. It's not an Apple stock drive. It's a Samsung drive I bought at OWC (still under warranty, so I can get a replacement for free, but I'd like to keep my data one way or the other).

Click to expand...

Wow. IF SMART is telling you the drive is bad, then it's really, really bad! Best to back it up ASAP. SMART is a good idea on paper but when it was developed by the HDD manufacturers, they did a poor job at it and HDD's typically fail without SMART ever saying there's something wrong.

Your Time Machine backup is probably good. In my experience, I've never had a bad one, nor heard of a bad one.

If you want to attempt to save the drive, and have an IBM PC, you can take the HDD out and put it into the PC and run Spinrite on it. I love that program; it's a HDD repair and maintenance tool that I've used many times to repair Windows BSOD's and so forth. Your HDD likely has some bad sectors and Spinrite can repair them.

These are pics of me using Spinrite on the HDD from my MBP inside a Dell PC.