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Hard Drive Failing?

P

PlaceofDis

macrumors Core
Original poster
Jan 6, 2004
19,242
12
ok guys and gals i posted the other day that i was starting to have some problems with my powerbook, well the saga continues

i have narrowed it down to a hard drive problem i belive, but i want to be sure

what are the typical signs of a hard drive failing? what should i look for to know that this is indeed the problem

if i know its the problem i will do what i can to get a new hard drive and install it myself, although i know its tricky, i think i should be able to handle it so long as i take my time with it....

anyways, the reason i believe that my hardd drive is the suspect is because it had problems starting up, and still takes longer than ever to start, and when it was working still if i tried to read too much from the drive everything would lock up, i can also hear the drive being read from now, as i never noticied it before or it never happened before.

so to rule out the OS being the problem i attemped an archive and install: it failed
i then erased the drive and attmepted to install again and it stoped while still installing the BSD Subsystem....

so i am guessing that the hard drive is the problem

what do you think?

Please help!!!
 
if you can look at the drive from Disk Utility, select the drive not the volume, at the bottom of the window it will tell you the S.M.A.R.T status of the disk. see this thread about my disk fail.
 
Mine is on the slow verge of crapping out. It will studder for 15 minutes then go back to normal. Sometimes S.M.A.R.T does not work. When mine stops studdering - it runs normal. It is so bad it will not boot sometimes. I didn't look at your link (time constraint) but i am getting a 80gig 7200rpm drive. Look at newegg.com. It has a good deal on a 100 gig hard drive.

kyle
 
ok well my S.M.A.R.T. status is NOT SUPPORTED so i guess that means that the drive is dead

im on sort of a budget here right now, and laptop drives are pretty expensive

what im thinking of doing is just getting a 40 gig internal and using another drive i have for an external/backup

i checked newegg for internal laptop drives and i couldnt find anything too decent
 
Find the Apple Hardware Test CD that came with your PB. Boot from it and run the Extended test. If you get an error, it's probably dead or dying.

Just because you got "not Supported" under SMART doesn't mean the drive is failing. Some drives are simply not supported, most notably notebook drives.

Try also running First Aid in the Disk Utility and see what you get, though it probably don't matter. If you have DiskWarrior it might tell you if you have a hardware prob with your drive as well when it's trying to get through step 5.
 
update:

ok well i have tried the Hardware Test CD now, but it has found nothing wrong with the drive so far, however, it takes forever for Disk Utility to find the disk

i decided to rule out a problem with OS X by deleting the drive

Pather installation fails every time when checking the disk
Disk Utility cannot write zeros to the disk, it fails

the only possibility i see is that the hard drive is dead, every thing else also passes in the Hardware Test

any ideas or other suggestions to make sure that its the hard drive or this is proof enough?
 
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