Bad Hard Drive?

I was watching a full screen video and my MBP completely freezes (couldn't force quit anything). After a force shut down, my laptop hangs at the Apple with the spinning gear.

I tried resetting the NVRAM, Safe Boot (hung at the Apple screen with spinning gear for 10 minutes, showed a status bar as if it was checking the disk then hung there for another 10-20 minutes), and Verbose mode (got a Kernel panic).

When I booted from the install disk, I went into Disk Utility and checked my boot volume...it had the correct format and when I ran a verify/repair it said the drive was ok. I restarted and tried to reinstall the OS but when it says select a dive it doesn't show anything (after waiting for about 15 minutes).

I'm not exactly sure what the problem is...I'm pretty stumped at this point. Will I need to wipe the disk clean in Disk Utility for the OS to recognize it when reinstalling?

ecschwarz said:

It could either be the hard drive or the cable that connects the drive to the logic board. I've tested this by booting the drive off a USB<->SATA adapter (Wiebetech DriveDock, but other should work).

If the computer is still unbearably slow, it's probably the drive either mechanically or from a software standpoint. Erase it, reinstall OS X, and see if it works.

If the computer runs reasonably well (taking into account USB 2.0's speeds on older machines), it's probably the cable.

I guess what happens when the cable fails is that the computer is reading and writing just fine, then the connection goes out, and the pinwheel kicks in while the computer is trying to figure out what to do.

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I hadn't noticed any odd hangtimes. I use it to make music and it has ran fine. I was using VLC Player and it hung up and I had to force shutdown but other than that the read/write times seemed fine. I have another 2.5" drive that works so I will connect it to see if it is recognized after everything finishes backing up.

GhettoMrBob said:

When you say that you checked your boot volume, did you check:
A) the hard drive
B) the actual boot volume - will show as a subvolume of the hard drive in disk utility

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In Disk Utility it displayed the Fujitsu drive and then the subvolume said Macintosh HD. The status was showed as Not Mounted if that helps.

GhettoMrBob said:

That sounds like filesystem corruption to me.
Boot up to your install disk and try to repair the "Macintosh HD" partition. You may need to try both the repair permissions and repair disk. If it's not mounted, select the partition and select "mount" at the top in Disk Utility. Post back with the results of that.

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I actually considered that however it wont let me mount the drive nor will it allow me to repair permissions...is there a work-around for this?

GhettoMrBob said:

You wouldn't happen to have DiskWarrior would you?

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No I do not

If it its of any help, I have a 2.5" external drive that will allow me to install the OS to it but it still doesn't see the HDD in the system. I tried taking out the HDD in the system out and connecting it via SATA to USB and booted from the install disk but it hung on a grey screen with a cursor and I didn't even see the Apple with the gear as usual.

GhettoMrBob said:

Hmm, have a backup by chance? Time Machine and/or direct clone?

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Unfortunately the HDD I used to backup my computer was having me verify/repair it each time I used it so I sent it in to be repaired/replaced. I have all my files and stuff backed to another device but I never set it up with Time Machine since it is also used with my Windows computer.

GhettoMrBob said:

I'd say that if you're positive you have a backup of all your critical stuff and software to just reinstall from your disk.

To get around the installer not seeing the partition:
- Boot to disk, go to disk utility
- Select the partition, go to the erase tab at the top, and then select erase at the bottom right. That will reformat that partition and make it visible to the installer.
- Reinstall like normal.

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This is the error I got:
POSIX reports: The operation couldn’t be completed. Cannot allocate memory

I went into terminal and did a force unmount and diskutil zeroDisk /dev/
Got the same error. I took a 2.5" drive out of my Windows laptop and put it in and it will even go so far as to let me reformat and install OS X on that drive. I'll take the drive and connect it to my Windows desktop and format it and give it another go, otherwise I may need a replacement.