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Hard Drive Dead?

J

j0hnab

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 16, 2008
15
0
This story begins a few weeks ago with an XP install via BootCamp. After a while the rebooting got tiring, so this past Monday I installed VMWare. I began using it to access my BootCamp partition, but decided yesterday I would do away with the BootCamp partition so as to use the unity view.

Now a background on my mac. It's a white Macbook from around 2006.

picture2wgi.png


Once I decided to change over the VMWare, I was getting some interesting warning signs like OS X sometimes not restarting without a hard reset and Windows not starting up every time. Yesterday I was doing way too much for my processor and OS X finally froze (never happened in the history of this mac). The hard drive seemed to be making a clicking sound, so when I tried a hard reset all I got was the question mark folder on startup. My first instinct was to go to the Time Machine backup I've been running, but there was no internal hard drive to point it to. A while back I made an OS X clean install partition on an old external and that's what I'm running now.

Check this out:
picture1znv.png


So I'm now wondering, is it finally time to upgrade my old 60GB original HDD? I've been planning on it forever and this is a great reason to go ahead with it. If so, is there any way to access the crashed hard drive's files (Time Machine didn't get the last couple hours) and do y'all have any recommendations on a new drive?

Thanks so much for any help. Sorry for such a long post. If any additional info is needed to assess the issue just let me know.

John
 
Can you post pictures of what disk utility looks like?

Also, which Mac are you using? A MacBook? Unibody?
 
320 GB is dirt cheap nowadays. It does look like a dead drive if you can't see it in System Profiler or Disk Utility.
 
RE: Hard Drive Dead?

My suggestions:

1. Clone the Mac partition of your internal drive to an external drive using SuperDuper (you can do a "full clone" for free, without having to register)

2. Boot from the newly-cloned external drive. MAKE SURE it is an exact copy of the Mac partition you have on the internal drive.

3. Launch Disk Utility and wipe clean your internal drive, re-initializing it for Mac-only.

4. RESTORE the internal by re-cloning the contents of the external drive BACK TO the internal drive.

- John
 
Yep. Your hard drive is dead. RIP hard drive.

There is no way to recover the data off the hard drive short of an expensive data recovery service. Losing 2 hours of work isn't as big of deal as some people who don't back up at all and lose all their work, so be glad you back up ;)

Can you hear your internal drive spinning at all?

Fishrrman, those steps won't work if the internal drive isn't even recognized by disk utility.
 
haha thanks for the help. I don't even think I've lost anything from those 2 hours so it's all ok. Just a great reason to get a huge new hard drive.
 
Oh and no there are no physical signs of life at all. Thanks for the suggestion Fish but I think geoff is right. Favorite hard drive supplier anyone?
 
WD + NewEgg. I actually bought a 500GB Scorpio Blue ($95 + free shipping) from them last night to upgrade my MBP's internal drive (and pass that on to my Mac Mini) ;)

Wouldn't buy drives from anywhere else ;)
 
Greatly appreciated. Interesting side job by the way. Entrepreneurship in college is a beautiful thing. May be attempting it myself soon.
 
Thanks guys. Just got back from class. Really appreciate the help.
 
what do y'all think of this one?

I have an external for storage so I'm not sure if I'll need all 500gb that the other one offers. This is also close to the same price as far as gb/$. Am I not considering anything else?
 
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If you aren't getting a 500GB, go for 7200RPM. Scorpio Black is WD's 7200RPM line.

The 500GB drive is so dense that it is comparable in speed to 7200RPM drives. Any lower in size and the speed drops.
 
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