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Is my Hard Drive on the Fritz?

B

BeeHive

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 20, 2014
12
0
Hello,

I have recently upgraded my powermac Quicksilver to Tiger, so it has been seeing much more use. Yesterday, it hung up on the apple logo while booting, so I held down the power button until it completely shut off. When I booted it up today, the desktop had resorted to its default picture which gave me a strange feeling. Then I snooped around the computer, and the contents of my iTunes library, Documents folder, and Pictures folder were gone. The applications I have recently downloaded were still there, though. In addition the original 12 year old 80 gig hard drive has been clicking a lot louder than usual these past couple of days. Is the hard drive about to melt down and these are the warning signs?
:confused:
Thanks for any help,
BeeHive
 
M

mccjim12

macrumors regular
Sep 23, 2012
103
17
Stamford, CT
I would say so. Clicking is almost certainly a sign of hard drive failure. That coupled with screwed up booting, missing data, and the age of it probably means it isn't long for the World.
 
A

AmestrisXServe

macrumors 6502
Feb 6, 2014
263
4
The Apple Update processes can remove, trash, erase, etc., some directories, including directories in the /Users path. That is the more plausible reason for you to lose files after this type of update.

If the drive was failing (check SMART status), files would more likely become unreadable: They wouldn't simply vanish.

The update also changes plists, so your old preferences, including your desktop image, may not be preserved. The desktop image prefs can also be lost when zapping PRAM, or simply if the plist files are corrupted for any reason.

It is wise to make a full system backup, before running any update process, especially if you are doing a major version update, such as 10.3 to 10.4.
 
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