how to test for a bad hd?

[fowler.]

I have a feeling my hard drive is going. I'm getting the spinning beach ball quite often these days... and with 2 gigs of ram and a fairly recent fresh install (~6 months), it surely can't be either of those.

Is there any to test what's up with the hd? X-Bench?

 

[Neil321]

You could try going into disk utilities>first aid, verifying the disk,if something shows up there's a repair option

 

[ert3]

There is also the possibility that you inadvertently installed to many startup apps and they are dominating your system resources.

To that end if you are running a PowerBook you should know that universal binaries are rather clunky.

 

[The Stig]

Tech Tool

If you want to spent some money, try Tech Tool Pro. It is a great tool, and it will scan your HD and do a surface scan and read/write tests and then fix any problems on top of all the other stuff it does. It might have a demo version but I don't know.

See http://www.micromat.com/ for more information.

I'm in no way a partner with Micromat. I just bought the software and I really like it.

The Stig

 

[steinlager]

Are you running Leopard?

I'm not sure if this applies to Tiger as well, but try booting from the installation disc and select Disk Utility at the top. Do verify/repair disc and it'll tell you if you have problems. Worked for me when I had kernel panics during bootcamp partitioning.