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Bad hard drive or other issue?

steve knight

steve knight

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jan 28, 2009
2,735
7,180
hind of hard to know but I found my mini late 2011 running super slow after boot-up this morning.
finally got to reboot and after 10 minutes or so it never finished so rebooted and held the option key down it showed the normal disc and the recovery one when I chose the recovery it took awhile then showed a circle with a line through it. so I am thinking hard drive but not sure.
 
Yeah, sounds typical of a hard drive failure where bad sectors are preventing it form booting up properly or very slowly.
 
been so long since I had a bad hard drive. can't remember how hard it is to replace been 3 years since I opened it up. or just pay someone to do it. don't have a lot of money but I also hate hassles. no special drive right?
 
Create a new user and boot with it. If the problem goes away it is a software issue.
You can check the hard drive smart status too.
Back ups!!
 
If you have Time Machine backups or from another backup solution, it won't be hard at all. Changing the HDD is easy too. If you need assistance, ifixit.com has great picture and step-by-step tutorials on how to do it.
 
should do a upgrade ti is about time but after buying three pairs of shows for the family that was about 1/2 the cost. I can do a trade in if I replace the drive that would knock off maybe 200.00 after the cost of a new drive.
any recommended hard drive?
 
ok so I made a usb boot drive ran verify disc and repair disc (said no problems) and repair permissions and rebooted and its fine. so now I wonder should I return the hard drive or replace it?
 
First thing I'd say is make sure you are backing up regularly. I agree that the HDD seems to be dying. Drives have improved a lot and you can put in a much better HDD (eg WD running at 7200 rpm) or an SSD. You can do this yourself if you are reasonably practical and careful. Lots of threads I did mine 12 months ago and there is another thread just this week here. If I where you I would research the various options, eg 256 or 500GB SSD vs 500GB, 750GB or 1TB HDD and then replace.
 
If you're comfortable with the status of the current drive now, I'd keep whatever you just bought and either re-purpose it for storage or keep it in the box in case the other drive does fail.
 
Steve I have a Western Digital 750GB Scorpio Black, bought and installed last year for about £60. I am very happy, pretty fast at 7200rpm so blackmagic speed test is around 110 vs 75ish I used to get with stock drive (SSD would be 250 as limited by SATA 2)

I think this is the model but I can double check - looks like they are a bit cheaper now.

ebuyer wd black 750gb hdd
 
Spent 140 and got a ssd this is a cheaper upgrade then a faster computer and speeds this thing up incredibly. Though something came loose my indicator light does not light up
 
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