Hard drive / Volume Corruption problems

[macbookdown]

I have a 17" MacBook Pro 2,1 ~2006 model 2.33 Intel Processor, running Snow Leopard.

A year ago I upgrade the ram to 4GB (though this model only recognizes 3GB), and upgraded the internal hard drive to a 500GB 7200rpm Seagate Momentus.

Since April this year, I have had 3 ocassions where the Screensaver locks up, the only recovery is to power off by holding the power button down for a few seconds, which leads to me loosing my drive partition.

Because of the way OS X is sucky about mount points, I have the entire 500GB partition as one volume.

Up until last week, I treated this as a minor annoyance, as I have multiple time machine backups, and the reformat and restore works and is relatively quick.

Aside from making me reluctant to travel with this laptop (luckily I have an Air as well, but that does not work for all my needs).

On my most recent trip not only did the volume get corrupted, the machine did not recognize the drive, or any drives on the machine (incl. the dvd drive).

Only after removing the drive completely, a combination of the boot up key sequences for resetting the machine, and booting off the cd, did I manage to get the machine to eventually recognize the hard drive.

I am unable to determine if this is a faulty drive, or a faulty machine.

I have run the Apple Hardware Diagnostics which give the all clear - I have nothing to stress test the drive, and I am running out of debug options and patience.

Although this laptop is getting "long in the tooth", it still works like a champ (except when it crashes), and my only gripe being its weight.

Any suggestions folks?

 

[jav6454]

Insert the Snow Leopard disc and boot up from it. Go thru the first steps as if you were reinstalling OS X. However, go to the top bar and look in the menus for Disk Utility. Select it. Look for your hard drive. Click it's name on the left pane and choose Verify Disk on the options on the bottom right. If your hard drive is corrupt, this will tell you. If it is corrupted, there is an option to fix it.

If the HDD keeps giving you problems, faulty drive. If the test comes out clean, then faulty hardware, call Apple.

 

[macbookdown]

Thanks.

I did the steps as you had suggested. Unfortunately the Disk utility diagnostics are fairly limited, and tell me the volume is faulty and can not be repaired.
Erasing the partition, and reinstalling from a time machine backup does the trick.

What concerned me is this last time it happened, the machine gave weird issues, like blinking folder saying no volume, not allowing me to use option key to boot from cdrom, and an instance of the cd installer crashing upon loading, leading me to think it might not be the hard drive, and the fault resides with the laptop.

This laptop is out of warranty and Apple Care, and quite frankly, when I took it to Apple the first time round, they did not give me any confidence in their level of technical ability, or debugging (NYC Apple Store).

I wish there was some diagnostic tool, even I had to buy one, that could stress check all the components.

I am reluctant to bin a serviceable laptop, or spend as much as buying a new one to have it debugged/repaired.