El Capitan destroyed my MBP-2009 hard drive?

[0929471]

Yep, after having had El Capitan installed for a few weeks, recently updated to 'public beta 3', I decided to restart my MBP today, as it felt quite slow.

My computer shuts off and when it attempts to start up again, a weird clicking noise begins, that I've never heard before.
I am taken to a huge circle with a X in the middle (not referring to OSX), meaning the computer couldn't find a drive to boot up, all of a sudden.

I panic, hard restart and hold CMD+R to repair the disk.

IT'S ACTUALLY GONE.

Just like that, for a simple restart, my hard drive completely crashed, and it is apparently irretrievable.

I've got a TimeMachine back-up thankfully, but no disk to install it on. No disk to do a clean install of El Capitan/Yosemite with either. No external hard drives at my disposal either.

Has this happened to anyone else? What do I do - take it to Apple's genius bar and pay the price (literally and figuratively) for signing up for the public beta? Is it fixable?

 

[chabig]

That sounds like a simple hard drive failure. The drive hardware doesn't care what software is installed. You'll have to install a replacement drive, boot to Internet Recovery, and restore from your Time Machine backup.

 

[JackieInCo]

You have a 2009 MBP so you can replace the drive yourself. It's easy to do and will take ten minutes to do. Don't waste time with taking it to Apple.

 

[brand]

What do I do - take it to Apple's genius bar and pay the price (literally and figuratively) for signing up for the public beta?

The public beta had nothing to do with your hard drive having a physical failure. If you immediately start pointing fingers at the public beta as the cause of your hard drive failure then you are obviously not the intended audience for the public beta.

Did it not occur to you that the computer is 6 years old and if it still has the original hard drive that the drive is well past its life expectancy and that the drive could fail at any time?

 

[throAU]

Your hard drive failed.

El Capitan did not do it, however the activity on various parts of the drive that were not often used as part of the installation process may have brought an underlying hardware problem to light.

 

[Queen6]

Installing a new OS on your Mac is going to stress the mechanical drive far more than normal usage. The drive would have failed in time regardless. As others have stated replace the drive yourself and reload your backup. If you want to look at 10.11 I recommend that you make a bootable clone on an external drive with SuperDouper or Carbon Copy Cloner, this way your system & data is safe.

Q-6

 

[Debi713]

Yep, after having had El Capitan installed for a few weeks, recently updated to 'public beta 3', I decided to restart my MBP today, as it felt quite slow.

My computer shuts off and when it attempts to start up again, a weird clicking noise begins, that I've never heard before.
I am taken to a huge circle with a X in the middle (not referring to OSX), meaning the computer couldn't find a drive to boot up, all of a sudden.

I panic, hard restart and hold CMD+R to repair the disk.

IT'S ACTUALLY GONE.

Just like that, for a simple restart, my hard drive completely crashed, and it is apparently irretrievable.

I've got a TimeMachine back-up thankfully, but no disk to install it on. No disk to do a clean install of El Capitan/Yosemite with either. No external hard drives at my disposal either.

Has this happened to anyone else? What do I do - take it to Apple's genius bar and pay the price (literally and figuratively) for signing up for the public beta? Is it fixable?

Strange, I had the exact same thing happen to me. I installed El Capitain and as soon as I tried using programs on my computer I got a clicking noise and nothing would load. Tried a reboot and disk was gone. Never had any issues with the disk, it worked fine until I installed El Capitan. Luckily I had a back up and ended up going to buy a new disk.

 

[pastrychef]

1. Upgrading OS X does nothing but lots of reads and writes to your hard drive.
2. Hard drives are designed to be written to and read from.
3. All hard drives fail. It's just a matter of time.

 

[Debi713]

1. Upgrading OS X does nothing but lots of reads and writes to your hard drive.
2. Hard drives are designed to be written to and read from.
3. All hard drives fail. It's just a matter of time.

Yes I know that. My comment was that it was strange, and that I had no issues prior to loading the new software.

 

[throAU]

Yes I know that. My comment was that it was strange, and that I had no issues prior to loading the new software.

You had no apparent issues. Quite likely the drive was on its way out, and making it read/write large amounts, and to critical sectors on the disk resulted in it dying.

 

[kahlish]

I am having the same issue after trying to upgrade to el capitan. So I ran the computer in single use mode to see where it fails. Does anyone know what this code means? See the picture inserted. my computer fails rite after this...

 

[\-V-/]

It's coincidental ... nothing more. Replace the drive and be done with it. That's why back ups are important. Drives can fail at any moment, regardless if they seemed to be working fine 5 minutes before. That's the nature of them.

 

[throAU]

I am having the same issue after trying to upgrade to el capitan. So I ran the computer in single use mode to see where it fails. Does anyone know what this code means? See the picture inserted. my computer fails rite after this...

That is filesystem damage (not specifically a hardware problem being reported there, may or may not be a hardware thing).

Could be due to failing to shut down properly, doesn't look like fsck is showing any "hard" errors, but keep an eye on it in case problems get worse.

As always, make sure you have backups. Backups are so easy with time machine on the mac that there's really no excuse not to. Yes there are plenty of other options, but time machine is built in and dead simple to configure.

As mentioned above, drives can fail at any time, your mac can be stolen, your house could burn down, etc.

Ideally, have 2 backup locations, and rotate one of them off-site (store at work, with parents, friend or whatever) on a reasonably regular basis (e.g., once a month or week depending on how much data you are prepared to lose).

The design life expectancy for a hard drive is about 3 years (which is why applecare runs out after 3), and especially after 4 years the failure rate goes up a lot. It is normally distributed, 3 years expectancy covers say 96% of drives or more.

If your hard drive is > 3-4 years old, you are on borrowed time really - but again, any drive can fail at any time, be stolen, etc. Your drive may last 7 years or more, but it is statistically not reliably going to make it.

Consider what situation you would be in if your machine was to be stolen or catch fire today; if that would result in you losing data you can't lose - consider how you can back your stuff up today - before things fail. You don't always get any warning of unrecoverable data loss.