Disk Utility reporting fatal hardware error... what?

[Drodrey]

I have a late 2008 13 inch aluminum macbook. Never had any major problems.
The last couple of days safari has been crashing pretty frequently for me. I've been using chrome no problem, but i do prefer safari, so I just googled it and got pointed to Repair Permissions in Disk Utility.

So I just opened Disk Utility, which I'm fairly sure I've never used before, and it's saying, under my HD "this drive has reported a fatal hardware error to Disk Utility. If the drive has not failed completely, back up as much data as you can and then replace it with a working drive."

It's saying it for both "FUJITSU MHZ2250BH FFS G1 Media" (I'm not even sure what that is) and "Macintosh HD".

What the hell. There's nothing wrong with my computer? I've googled around and apparently this means my machines about to die?

any advice?

 

[Thrnarg]

Your hard drive is probably failing. It might get worse, it might be fine for a while or not.

Backup anything important and look at getting the machine serviced or do it yourself if your keen, its not that hard but you will need your OS install disks.

Fujitsu xxxxx is the brand and model of the physical hard drive, Macintosh HD will be the partition on the drive.

 

[Peterkro]

Your drive has gone bad,get the data backed up while you still can, if your out of Applecare get a replacement drive and look on iFixit for a guide on installing it.Good luck.

 

[archipellago]

hmm.... 2 years, that seems about right or even good for a mac hdd.

what? you thought premium price meant reliability and longevity??

 

[old-wiz]

hmm.... 2 years, that seems about right or even good for a mac hdd.

what? you thought premium price meant reliability and longevity??

The HD is not produced by Apple. I have 2 Macs that are 5 years old and the HDs still work fine. An HD might fail in 10 minutes and it might fail in 10 years. It doesn't matter if it's a Mac or Windows PC or a Linux box.

 

[milbournosphere]

SMART Status? It could be that SMART knows your drive is failing. I suggest you heed the warning.