Erase disc

[Ftdills2]

Hello, my name is Tomas. So today i am facing first ever problem with mac, and i need your help guys.
Yesterday my mac just stopped working. The rainbow ball was just spinning all the time and thats it. When i tried to restart it by holding power button for few seconds, it did not boot. It keep sticking apple logo in grey background. So i put mac os cd and tried to repair hdd:
Volume bitmap needs minor repair for under-allocation
Checking volume information.
Volume header needs minor repair.
Repairing volume.
Rechecking volume.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Invalid extent entry.
....... Can't repair this disc....... Reformat the disk..
As i do not really care about the data that is on this hdd i tried to erase it, and this is what i got:
File system formatter failed
Or:
POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory.

Can someone please help me with this? I really need to use this computer.

Thank You for your help.

 

[teleromeo]

I guess you hard disk had died.

 

[Ftdills2]

So it is impossible to fix it?

 

[blueroom]

It takes some skill to replace the HDD in most iMacs, take it to an authorized repair depot or try your luck at iFixit.com.

 

[Ftdills2]

Im using macbook pro unibody. I was asking is it possible to fix the problem WITHOUT replacing HDD?

 

[benwiggy]

Use an external drive. Depending on what connections are available, it will probably be slower than an internal.
What exact model of Mac do you have? e.g. year or product code, e.g. 5,1.

Just checking: you do have a backup, don't you?

 

[teleromeo]

Hard drives in unibody MBP's are easy to replace, you'll only need 2 different screwdrivers. Eventually you could upgrade to an SSD.

 

[AcesHigh87]

As said replacing is pretty easy; there are guides online for how to do it. The other option would be to use an external drive and set it up as the boot drive but it would likely run pretty slow as a boot drive; especially over USB.

If you want to give your computer the biggest boost for your buck I'd replace the dead HDD with an SSD.

In short: The only way to "fix" this without replacing the hard drive is to use an external but it's gonna be painfully slow and you'll have to always carry an external around with you. Replacing the drive is pretty easy, I would personally do that.

 

[SpetsnaZ99]

Something similar happened to me about a month ago. My 2007 iMac shut down unexpectedly. When i tried to restart i first got the spinwheel for a couple of minutes then a 'No Entry' symbol. When searching these boards id almost resigned myself to the belief that the hard drive was dead. So i hope this info helps you.

Firstly i dug out my system disk and booted from it. This showed me that the mac was working and that the problem was with the hard drive.

My next step was to get hold of some sort of external drive (it will need to be big enough to be able to install a working system). I used an 80g iPod classic. I connected it to a windows laptop and formatted it as fat32, this meant there was no iOS on the iPod it was just a formatted volume. I then connected it to my mac and used Disk Utility to format it as HFS, I then installed the system there and chose it as the boot volume. I then restarted my mac. Now my Mac was up and running i could use 'Disk Utility' to look at the hard drive. When i tried 'Verify' it told me there was an error on the disk and it needed repairing. I ran 'Repair' and it said everything was fine. However the drive wouldnt mount. So, again using Disk Utility i deleted the partition and created a new partition, 142g in size. That went fine the new volume mounted. I then created an extra partition with the remaining space left (107g in size). For some wierd reason i now have more space with the split drive than i did when it was one partition. If I remember correctly i only had about 236g about a month ago.

So just to point out, the drive may not be dead. You might just need to reformat and start again.

 

[teleromeo]

Firstly i dug out my system disk and booted from it.

At that stage you could have used Disk utility, since it is on the system disk.

 

[Ftdills2]

So guys, i replaced HDD, however I'm getting the same error when I'm trying to create partition.. Any suggestions? Whenever disk utility is trying to unmount or mount the disk, I'm getting error. I heard that some how you have to manually unmount disk using command line and than try to erase disk or what ever, I'm not sure..