How Do I Look For Corrupt Files On My Incredibly Corrupt Hard Drive?

[joshspazjosh]

I am a poor college student whose 2-year-old iMac has basically been failing for the past 6 months, and I didn't bring it in to the Genius Bar because I had 460GB of data on my computer with no backup solution. I've finally purchased a 500GB external hard drive to back up all my files and I'm bringing the computer in to the Apple Store tomorrow to get it fixed.

The only problem is that in the past six months my computer has froze literally hundreds of times while the hard drive was spinning - it's crashed while I was editing video in Final Cut, working in Photoshop, watching video, downloading large files, etc. So I understand that this is probably not a good thing, and I'm wondering if there's any way to detect any files that were corrupted during the many times I've force restarted this machine, and possibly fix the files so that I don't continue having problems after I get my hardware repaired.

Thanks so much!

 

[maxrobertson]

Well, you could try repairing the hard drive first. I'm no expert, though. Sorry

 

[JNB]

Disk Utility>Verify Disk (or >Repair Disk). There are other (non-free) utilities out there, but this is step one.

Seriously, if you've got that much data and have had that many problems with no backup for that long of a time , expect a lot of grief from these quarters. Yeah, it's beating a dead horse, but you know the Internet...

 

[CanadaRAM]

Have you done the backup yet?

If not, use the free Carbon Copy CLoner to make a bootable clone of the drive to the external. Then you can boot from the external to make repairs on the internal.

If you haven't got an OS on the external, then boot from the OSX DVD that came with your machine (hold down the C key through startup) and then you can go into the Utilities menu: Disk Utility and do a Repair Disk.