Disk failing? Help

[Broric]

Hey,

I recently installed Disk Drill from the maclegion bundle and it seems to have killed my hard drive (27" iMac Lion). Everything started beachballing badly so I uninstalled it but that hasn't help. Upon login, it just beach balls. I tried starting in safe mode with shift held down but progress bar freezes after a few seconds.

Starting in recovery mode with cmd+r the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive is that it's failing. I'm not sure if this has been caused by Disk Drill but it was previously fine.

I have the majority of things backed up but there's a few I don't that I really don't want to lose.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Also I'm not sure where I stand with regards to warranty. I bought the iMac through the education store about 2 years ago, UK based.

 

[Quad5Ny]

The program did not kill your drive. If the SMART Status says failing, you need a new HD.

Backup what you can and call a Apple store to see how much it would cost to replace. Large (>1TB) quality (WD Black) Hard drives are cheap these days (<$90 USD), although I'm not sure how much Apple will charge you.

iMac HD's are a bitc*h to replace. If your inexperienced, it's not something you want to do yourself.


To backup your stuff: Plug in a external USB HD, Install OS X to it, Boot from the USB drive, Then copy any files you can from your dying drive.

 

[Broric]

What I meant by it killing the drive is that it seems that the monitoring it was doing put extra stress on an already failing drive. Along the same lines, disabling spotlight completely seems to have helped a bit, I can at least load a terminal now and tar up the folders I wanted to backup.

It's still under AppleCare for another year so going to take it in rather than trying to replace myself.

Interested about your comment of installing to a USB drive, can I do that in Lion after cmd-R-ing? Would it work on a flash stick? That seems like it would be useful in general but think after this I might just invest in a Time Capsule.

 

[Quad5Ny]

If Command+R still works, then yes you can.

You could install to a flash drive, but it might be extremely slow (depends on the speed of the drive).