Disc Repair Issue?

[Hrothgar]

My late 2011 15" MPB, running Mavericks 10.9.4, started running very slow. I ran verify disk in disk utility. I got the following error:

Checking volume bitmap.
Volume bitmap needs minor repair for orphaned blocks.
Invalid volume free block count.
(It should be 26319165 instead of 2217283)
The volume Macintosh HD was found corrupt and needs to be repaired.

A popup said:

This disk needs to be repaired using the Recovery HD. Restart your computer, holding down the Command key and the R key until you see the Apple logo. When the OS X Utilities window appears, choose Disk Utility.

Is there a chance that if I run the Disk Utility I'll completely screw up the disk?
Any way to guess how bad this is? I've been doing backups with Carbon Copy Cloner. Should I re-install? Or will that just copy over the same problem?

 

[DeltaMac]

This is the wrong forum (again )
It's for MacBooks, and you have a MacBook Pro.

Anyway - boot to your recovery partition, and run Disk Utility. Choose Repair Disk (different from Repair Disk Permissions, which won't help your situation)
If the Repair Disk won't repair your hard drive, then you could try Disk Warrior.

And, finally, your symptoms may show that you have a failing hard drive, and that will need to be replaced.
At that point, you should then consider replacing with an SSD, not a hard drive.

 

[Hrothgar]

Oops!

But I think the problem was fixed.

I have almost 700 gb of data on the hard drive. I didn't think an SSD was an option.

 

[DeltaMac]

You have a 750GB hard drive?
How much free space is left on your drive?

If your free space is very low (less than 10GB would be what I call "very low), then that can directly affect the hard drive performance, possibly leading to data corruption.
My own rule of thumb for free space is a goal of more than 10% free space.

 

[Hrothgar]

Actually, I have more --about 100 gb free. (I forgot that I moved files off to a separate drive.)

But I don't understand how folks are replacing entire hard drives with SSD drives that have fairly low storage. I guess that's a question for a different topic.

 

[Big Ron]

In my case, I replaced the Drive with a SSD to speed things up. It was a Samsung EVO 840 250GByte. The process A: gave me the opportunity to re-install Mavericks and be selective about what Apps I re-installed AND B: I could use the original Drive in a cheap external USB caddy to have access to additional storage if I needed it.

I already had a Time Capsule to I back up to, but there is nothing stopping you using an original drive in an external caddy as your backup destination, just point Time Machine at it.