Hard drive failing

[Straighth]

So I have one of the infamous black macs. Running on osx 5.5 and I believe the hard drive is beginning to fail as I occasional hear clicking. Obviously I have been expecting this because its been nearly five and a half years since I purchased it. I have decided to reformat the hard drive. Will this in any way help prolong the hard drives life or is it hopeless?

Thanks!

 

[S.B.G]

So I have one of the infamous black macs. Running on osx 5.5 and I believe the hard drive is beginning to fail as I occasional hear clicking. Obviously I have been expecting this because its been nearly five and a half years since I purchased it. I have decided to reformat the hard drive. Will this in any way help prolong the hard drives life or is it hopeless?

Thanks!

Formatting it's not going to help it. It's starting to fail physically. You need to back up your information ASAP and get a new hard drive to replace that one. You can potentially extend it's life a little and/or repair any bad sectors with Spinrite, but if you're hearing clicking, Spinrite is not a total fix, but a crutch. The drive needs replacing.

Spinrite is a maintenance and data recovery utility. You have to have an IBM-PC in order to use it though. You take the HDD out of the Mac and connect it to the IBM-PC and run the program. Below is my old MBP HDD in a Dell PC with Spinrite working on it.

Independent review of Spinrite (not me)