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Blakeasd

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 29, 2009
643
0
Hello,

Today my Late 2009 made a very deep and sickly sounding hard drive startup sound. It was not the usual bright and fast hard drive noise. After 45 minutes of waiting for it to boot up, I can't click on anything without waiting a prolonged amount of time and getting a complete system wide freeze. How can I tell if my hard drive is near death or if it is something software related if I can't get to Disk Utility without me having to do a hard turn off.

If it does turn out to be the hard drive, what is the best course of action? Buy a new Macbook or replace the hard drive? Am I likely to run into more issues being that this computer is a little more than four years old?

Thanks for any advice and thanks!
 

rgarjr

macrumors 604
Apr 2, 2009
6,820
1,050
Southern California
Unusual mechanical sounds seems like hard drive is about to go belly up. You need to backup data if possible. Obviously getting a new drive will be cheaper than getting a new machine.
 

trevm999

macrumors member
Nov 5, 2013
61
0
The best thing to do is a hard turn off. If your drive is failing, leaving it trying to boot up will do more harm than good. Do you have a current back up? If you need data to be recovered, the best thing to do will be to take it to a technician. If you try to boot into the recovery partition, file system check will be run on the drive potentially damaging it further. If your data is safely backed up, then you can try running Disk Utility from the recovery partition, but Disk Utility doesn't actually tell you that much. If you want to see the health of the drive, the best thing to do would be to burn Parted Magic to a disk https://partedmagic.com/downloads boot to it and click on "disk health" to see the drive's SMART data. Sometimes when a hard drive is failing, you will be unable to boot to another volume, so the only way to check the drive's health is to remove it from the computer and connect to to a different one.
 
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