+Hard drive problem, thought it was dying but can it be something else?

[FLAVAH]

Hey whats up everyone, I replaced my HD on my MBP about a month ago with the Hitachi 7K320 HD from OWC, and yesterday I was working on it with itunes, iphoto, iweb, ichat, and some other small programs open, and then the spinning beach ball started coming up often. The screen then froze, and after about 10 minutes of letting it sit there frozen, I did a hard shut down. After that I tried turning it back on but it was stuck on the apple logo for quite a long time, then it went to a blue screen, and then to the login screen. At first it would not let me log in, but it has let me log in as root twice. Now the screen just stays blue and never reaches the login screen.

Ive ran disk utility and it still looks like my hard drive is still verified and i was able to fix permissions and repair it still. It says that the HD looks to be ok. The used data still shows how much i had used on the HD, and it is still named to what name I had for the HD. I listened to the HD, and it doesnt "click", but every five seconds or so, it buzzes very vaintly.

I switched the HD back to the original one and it went straight through. Is my Hitachi HD dead? Or can I still recover my data? Or is it some other problem that may be fixable? Help! Thanks in advance!

 

[wgr73]

I'd send it in for warranty work (replacement). It sounds like a bad HDD.

 

[alphaod]

Sounds like the HDD is dead—or maybe you messed something up. It would be difficult to recover any data if your HDD is dead, but you did make back ups right?

 

[FLAVAH]

yea i have a backup, but its been about two weeks...

do you guys think if i tried using disk utility to copy all the contents to another hd, itll work? if i can find a big enough hd around here i want to give it a try

 

[gnasher729]

yea i have a backup, but its been about two weeks...

do you guys think if i tried using disk utility to copy all the contents to another hd, itll work? if i can find a big enough hd around here i want to give it a try

I'd say borrow an external drive, boot from your Install DVDs, switch to Disk Utility and try to copy the whole drive using Disk Utility. If it works, you would then have a bootable disk with all your data. There is a chance that your hard drive has problems just after being powered on, which would prevent your Mac from booting, and the copying might work fine. Also, copying the whole drive with Disk Utility puts the least strain on the drive (it just reads one track after the other and doesn't have to move the heads forth and backwards all the time), so this might work even if the drive is a bit dodgy.

Or buy an external drive, and use it for Time Machine backups in the future 🙂