I/O Errors on WD Scorpio Black *HELP*

[cutarecord]

Three days ago a noisy fan brought me to the Genius Bar at my Apple store and when i got there the boot screen stayed gray and had a folder with a question mark in it. I have a late 2006 15" MPB running Snow Leopard 10.6.6. The guy told me i need a new hard drive so i went out and bought a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320g 7200 rpm SATA drive with a 16 mb cache. I replaced the old one with it, formated and installed OSX 10.6. I then used my time capsule to recover my last back up. I completely restored it.

TWO DAYS OF PERFECT USE

Now, i have the annoying fan noise again and my console is telling me that my HDD is having disk0-02 i/o errors. A LOT OF THEM. I've had at least 30 before noon today. Currently i am writing zeros to my drive and going to reinstall 10.6 WITHOUT using my time capsule restore (incase that has bad blocks written to it)

Has any one heard of issues like this before with the particular HDD i bought? Two HDD failures two days apart seems fishy to me, what other issues should I be looking at? Is it possible i'm getting the i/o errors from a bad HDD ribbon cable to the logic board?

Any help you can offer on this is MUCH appriciated...

Thanks,
Mike

 

[RaceTripper]

I had this happen to me a while back. It was a bad I/O controller and required a new motherboard.

Making sure the cable to the HD is seated properly is a good first step to troubleshooting/solving the problem.

 

[cutarecord]

ouch

is there a way to test that so i'm sure that is what the issue is?
How much did that cost you?

 

[RaceTripper]

is there a way to test that so i'm sure that is what the issue is?
How much did that cost you?

I suppose you could try running the hardware diagnostics from your original system DVD.

I paid nothing for my repair since I had AppleCare on the machine.

 

[cutarecord]

the system diagnostics will tell me if i have a bad i/o reader?

my apple care ran out three months ago

 

[cutarecord]

*controller sorry, my brain has a faulty language controller

 

[RaceTripper]

the system diagnostics will tell me if i have a bad i/o reader?

my apple care ran out three months ago

I don't know. Doesn't cost anything but time to run it.

When I had the problem, the Apple Genius decided my Mac had a bad I/O controller (I agreed), and it was repaired by replacing the logic board.

 

[Detrius]

Sometimes, the cables go bad too. That's worth looking into.

Ultimately, the best way to know is test the HD in the computer and then test the HD connected to another known good computer.


Also, if zeroing the drive makes a difference, you have a bad drive and should get it replaced. Zeroing the drive, or rather, writing anything to it, causes it to remap the bad sectors. You can see if the drive is aware of any bad sectors or if it has fixed any by looking at the smart table.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23777/smartctl

"Current pending sectors" are sectors that have not yet be remapped. "Reallocate event count" or "Reallocated sectors" are bad sectors that have been remapped. Anything other than zero on any of these means your drive is showing signs of failure.