I have a 2012 13" MBP with a Samsung 830 256 GB SSD.
Just tonight, I tried taking a screenshot and got a message that I did not have permission to. I then tried saving open files and was told there was an error.
Creating a new folder in the Finder caused a -50 error.
I tried rebooting and got to the Apple logo with spinning wheel but it never went anywhere. No error messages.
So, I restarted to Recovery Mode (Command-R). I opened Disk Utility from there, and it told me that there were errors with both the HD (listed as Samsung) and with Macintosh HD. The Macintosh HD error had something to do with the Journal. It could not be repaired.
So, I booted to a cloned drive I had made with SuperDuper. It booted very slowly and beachballed and my internal HD did not show up.
On a whim I decided to run Disk Utility from the cloned drive on the internal drive, and it again found errors but fixed them! I was so relieved (I do have a back-up clone but it's not terribly recent).
I could see the internal Macintosh HD and all the files appear to be there. I tried restarting to the internal drive, but it just stays on the spinning wheel.
I restarted back to the clone, and it still shows the internal drive. I verified it again, and it says the drive is OK.
So, it seems like I should be able to back-up my data tomorrow (I want to wait till I get a new drive because I don't want to write over the data on my cloned drive in case it corrupts what I already have saved).
But I'm wondering if once I back up, erase, and re-install my internal drive, assuming it works, should I trust it?
I have a few theories:
I do record a lot of video and use the drive pretty heavily. Could I have depleted the write cycles in 8 months of heavy use?
Could it be another hardware error on the computer that caused the drive to corrupt? The reason I ask is that this computer previously had the SATA cable between the hard drive and logic board fail, and I had similar problems where the computer wouldn't boot. On the MacBook Pro I had before this one, that same part failed 3 times! It seems to be a pattern for me that I have SATA cables fail.
Could it have been a software bug? The computer had some weird quirks since I got it back from my last repair. The repair depot installed Lion on it, even though it came with Mountain Lion. I upgraded it to Mountain Lion instead of doing a clean install. Something was odd with permissions in that I couldn't update iLife apps through the Mac App Store because it said that I had updates for a different user. I could never figure out what to do about that, but I always assumed it was a permissions issue, possibly caused by the depot installing Lion on a computer designed for Mountain Lion and possibly also installing iLife apps that had been registered to the depot instead of me. I don't know . . .
I guess I'll figure out the answers to my own questions once I back-up, erase, and reinstall OS X on the internal drive and see if it boots. I'm just worried that even if it does work, that it may still be failing and corrupt again due to either the SSD failing or due to something else like the SATA cable.
Any thoughts?
Thank you. Sorry I wrote so much. This got me so anxious, I didn't realize how much I wrote--I literally penned this out in a couple of minutes and the words got away from me!
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EDIT:
When I tried selecting the Macintosh HD as the start-up disk from Startup Disk under System Preferences I got this message:
You can’t change the startup disk to the selected disk.
The bless tool was unable to set the current boot disk.
That seems like an odd message for a disk that shows up OK under disk utility.
Is this a clue as to what's wrong?
Just tonight, I tried taking a screenshot and got a message that I did not have permission to. I then tried saving open files and was told there was an error.
Creating a new folder in the Finder caused a -50 error.
I tried rebooting and got to the Apple logo with spinning wheel but it never went anywhere. No error messages.
So, I restarted to Recovery Mode (Command-R). I opened Disk Utility from there, and it told me that there were errors with both the HD (listed as Samsung) and with Macintosh HD. The Macintosh HD error had something to do with the Journal. It could not be repaired.
So, I booted to a cloned drive I had made with SuperDuper. It booted very slowly and beachballed and my internal HD did not show up.
On a whim I decided to run Disk Utility from the cloned drive on the internal drive, and it again found errors but fixed them! I was so relieved (I do have a back-up clone but it's not terribly recent).
I could see the internal Macintosh HD and all the files appear to be there. I tried restarting to the internal drive, but it just stays on the spinning wheel.
I restarted back to the clone, and it still shows the internal drive. I verified it again, and it says the drive is OK.
So, it seems like I should be able to back-up my data tomorrow (I want to wait till I get a new drive because I don't want to write over the data on my cloned drive in case it corrupts what I already have saved).
But I'm wondering if once I back up, erase, and re-install my internal drive, assuming it works, should I trust it?
I have a few theories:
I do record a lot of video and use the drive pretty heavily. Could I have depleted the write cycles in 8 months of heavy use?
Could it be another hardware error on the computer that caused the drive to corrupt? The reason I ask is that this computer previously had the SATA cable between the hard drive and logic board fail, and I had similar problems where the computer wouldn't boot. On the MacBook Pro I had before this one, that same part failed 3 times! It seems to be a pattern for me that I have SATA cables fail.
Could it have been a software bug? The computer had some weird quirks since I got it back from my last repair. The repair depot installed Lion on it, even though it came with Mountain Lion. I upgraded it to Mountain Lion instead of doing a clean install. Something was odd with permissions in that I couldn't update iLife apps through the Mac App Store because it said that I had updates for a different user. I could never figure out what to do about that, but I always assumed it was a permissions issue, possibly caused by the depot installing Lion on a computer designed for Mountain Lion and possibly also installing iLife apps that had been registered to the depot instead of me. I don't know . . .
I guess I'll figure out the answers to my own questions once I back-up, erase, and reinstall OS X on the internal drive and see if it boots. I'm just worried that even if it does work, that it may still be failing and corrupt again due to either the SSD failing or due to something else like the SATA cable.
Any thoughts?
Thank you. Sorry I wrote so much. This got me so anxious, I didn't realize how much I wrote--I literally penned this out in a couple of minutes and the words got away from me!
----------
EDIT:
When I tried selecting the Macintosh HD as the start-up disk from Startup Disk under System Preferences I got this message:
You can’t change the startup disk to the selected disk.
The bless tool was unable to set the current boot disk.
That seems like an odd message for a disk that shows up OK under disk utility.
Is this a clue as to what's wrong?