The other morning, my computer froze, and i restarted it, only to be greeted by the flashing question mark folder. I tried resetting the PRAM, resetting the VRAM, booting and holding alt to select my HD, even reseating the HD inside. Nothing worked. I put in my LION OS install DVD and had it repair the disk, which it could not do, and it said that the disk needs to be erased. I tried to erase it, but I got an error message after a bit that said "File System Formatter Failed". I don't know what to do. I have a backup of all my files on an external. Do I need to return the HD? Is there a way to heal it? Help!
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Hard Drive Failure (question mark folder) Help!
- Thread starter MrFluffums
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You very likely have some bad sectors on the HDD preventing anything from reading/writing to the HDD. If you're computer is still under warranty take it in and have a new HDD put in. Or if you're savvy enough and it's out of warranty you can put a new one in yourself.
I actually use a PC DOS-based program called Spinrite as a maintenance utility and data recovery utility on all my HDD's. You have to have an IBM-PC in order to use it though. You take the HDD out of the Mac and connect it to the IBM-PC and run the program. Below is my old MBP HDD in a Dell PC with Spinrite working on it.
