Macbook hard drive failure?

[jfremani]

So, my girlfriend was using my macbook lastnight and said she got the beachball of death, so she tried to reboot. However, the grey screen comes up (no logo or curser) upon bootup and does not go beyond this point.

I tried safe boot (shift), reset the P-ram, and tried the boot menu with no success. Today I put the OSX disk in and ran the disk util and got an error when running disk verify or disk repair.

The error is:

"Invalid node structure
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree
The Volume OSX could not be repaired"

The macbook is from September 2007, but I upgraded the hard drive a few months after that. Is the hard drive toast? Or what's the recommended next step(s)? The hard drive is a 200gb Hitachi drive that I really can't shell out the money to replace for a few weeks.

 

[jfremani]

I should also point out that the Disk Utility in the Leopard disk does not recognize any drive present but the Tiger Disk Utility does and this is where I got the errors.

This happened to me before around 6 months ago after an update, I figured it was just a botched update.. and this latest bout was after a recent update (safari 4).

 

[holidaypf]

Probably not a physical hard drive failure. Just had a friend drop off a black macbook for repair. It made a clicking noise when starting up and then presented the folder icon with the flashing question mark. I took out the hard drive, held it next to my ear and gave it a little shake. Yep, something rattled around in there. New hard drive fixed the problem. So your situation is different. Really sounds like the hard drive is physically ok, but the system files are messed up.

I would try a utility like tech tool pro and see if that can diagnose/fix the problem. Of course, ideally, there is a backup. In which case, you could try reformatting the drive and reinstalling the OS. Did you also try "Repair Disk Permissions?"

 

[iBookG4user]

Do you hear any clicking sounds coming from the hard drive or any other odd sounds? It does sound like the hard drive failed though, I hope that she had her files backed up.

 

[jfremani]

I did not see an option to repair disk permissions within disk utility. The hard drive doesnt make any noises.