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My 5 month old MBP's HD Failed? WTF?

AHDuke99

AHDuke99

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Nov 14, 2002
2,320
159
Charleston, SC
Really? I just lost an entire semesters worth of work and countless other files because my five month old computer's hard drive failed? Apple replaced the drive but told me it could cost an additional $500-$1000 to recover the data off my old drive?

Granted, it was my fault for not having a backup in place since August, but I live in cramped quarters, travel a lot, and never have the space to lug around my external HDs, and I thought I could rely on having a computer's HD work for more than 5 months before crapping out. I'm furious right now. I've owned Macs since the 1990s, and I've never had an issue like this before today. I guess I can spend the $1000 now to get my work back.
 
Sorry to hear about your loss
That is very frustrating I know

Unfortunately, data storage is always cheaper than data recovery :(
All HDs fail... some sooner than later
 
It stinks when this happens...but carbonite is like what $65 a year and I would recommend that at the least. Sure its slow across the internet but with a portable laptop odds are you are connecting to the internet at some point and if and when you do carbonite would of backed it up.

It seems with services like this, incidents like this shouldn't still happen in today's world.
 
What kind of failure, physical or just the partition table?

If it is the latter, you can use Data Rescue 3 to recover your files, it costs around 99USD.

It helped me with a lot of HDD crashes, sometimes even with S.M.A.R.T. failures.
 
I am still beyond pissed. Apple said it would not mount, and thus unable to transfer any data using the method they use in the store. I have no idea if it's physical failure or not. I assume it isn't though. All I know if it would not start up past the Apple Logo and then would not mount in the store. They gave me names of these data recover firms, so I assume those programs will be useless for me.


I just hope I can get this fixed before class resumes after break. I've also lost pictures, music, videos, applications along with my school work. Apple's quality control is slipping.
 
I can understand you being pissed.

But Apple has nothing to do with the HDD's quality and failure rate.

They buy them in masses from different vendors and as every mass produced product, it is bound to fail at some point. Sometimes sooner than later.

For future endeavours get an external second 2.5" HDD to take with you for backup purposes.
 
AHDuke99 said:
I am still beyond pissed. Apple said it would not mount, and thus unable to transfer any data using the method they use in the store. I have no idea if it's physical failure or not. I assume it isn't though. All I know if it would not start up past the Apple Logo and then would not mount in the store. They gave me names of these data recover firms, so I assume those programs will be useless for me.


I just hope I can get this fixed before class resumes after break. I've also lost pictures, music, videos, applications along with my school work. Apple's quality control is slipping.
Click to expand...

When I got my iMac 2007 (about 3-4 years ago now), the optical drive failed on the first week. The computer was new and it took ages for the optical drive to get fixed. I was pretty pissed because I couldn't play games or do anything that required a disk:(

Sometimes its just unlucky when you get the "bad egg".
 
It doesn't matter what type of computer you have (Apple, Dell, Sony, etc) harddrives are shipped by different manufacturers and there is absolutely no way of telling the life span on one.

Being in IT for who knows how many years I can easily say I've seen drives that are 10 years old and run fine and new ones straight out of the box fail in a few days. There is just no way to tell.

I would suggest getting a laptop harddrive and an external enclosure off of newegg and just using time machine. It backs up everything and you can restore from it.

Thats not my recommended way to back up everything but its better then nothing. I would say if you travel a lot and don't want to carry an external get a dropbox account.
 
AHDuke99 said:
I am still beyond pissed. Apple said it would not mount, and thus unable to transfer any data using the method they use in the store. I have no idea if it's physical failure or not. I assume it isn't though. All I know if it would not start up past the Apple Logo and then would not mount in the store. They gave me names of these data recover firms, so I assume those programs will be useless for me.


I just hope I can get this fixed before class resumes after break. I've also lost pictures, music, videos, applications along with my school work. Apple's quality control is slipping.
Click to expand...

That sucks, I hope you are able to recover some or all of it. In all fairness, Apple's QC applied during the assembly and testing of the machine, and it seemed to be OK for you for 5 months. I would probably direct my frustration at the drive manufacturer, but like MacDawg said, all drives die eventually.
 
AHDuke99 said:
I am still beyond pissed. Apple said it would not mount, and thus unable to transfer any data using the method they use in the store. I have no idea if it's physical failure or not. I assume it isn't though. All I know if it would not start up past the Apple Logo and then would not mount in the store. They gave me names of these data recover firms, so I assume those programs will be useless for me.


I just hope I can get this fixed before class resumes after break. I've also lost pictures, music, videos, applications along with my school work. Apple's quality control is slipping.
Click to expand...

Sorry to hear about that. Live & learn. Always back up your goods.

Purchase a 500gb WD passport external hard drive or 2 for ~$100/unit. It's a little bigger than an iphone and not a "lug around" digital life-saver, in this case. If you still consider that something you'd have to 'lug around'- life will continue to be hard for you.

<:apple:
 
i would like to say i feel sorry for you but it is your own fault for not having a back up.

hard drives WILL fail. i once bought a WD 500gb drive and it died within a week of use. thankfully i only had a few things on it that were easily replaced and it was under warranty.

I always make sure I have at least 2 back ups of my data.

my MBP is backed up to my NAS, running in RAID 1. i also do a clone of the HD to a portable external drive every week.

I also use my NAS for all my media and documents since its running RAID 1 i dont have as much worry about a drive failing and losing my data.

Another back up solution I use is dropbox. This is where i keep anything that I consider irreplaceable or hard to replace. things such as documents for work i am currently working on or papers for school. It gets stored on the dropbox server and on any other computer i have it synced with.
 
AHDuke99 said:
Really? I just lost an entire semesters worth of work and countless other files because my five month old computer's hard drive failed? Apple replaced the drive but told me it could cost an additional $500-$1000 to recover the data off my old drive?

Granted, it was my fault for not having a backup in place since August, but I live in cramped quarters, travel a lot, and never have the space to lug around my external HDs, and I thought I could rely on having a computer's HD work for more than 5 months before crapping out. I'm furious right now. I've owned Macs since the 1990s, and I've never had an issue like this before today. I guess I can spend the $1000 now to get my work back.
Click to expand...

Mine failed after 3 weeks!!! luckily they gave me a new one and I didn't have much on my laptop at the time...otherwise I would have been pissed.
 
Funny thing, everybody claims that all hd's will fail and that a back-up is more or less mandatory

First of all, let me confirm that back-ups ARE crucial for a lot of reasons.

However, I still have pc's working that have with harddrives that are easily over 10 years old without ever having encountered any problems. Same goes for the people around me, never heard them "back in the days" about failing hard drives and everybody in school had their own pc's.

The last three years however, I see and hear more and more of relative new hard drives that are failing all around me. Pc's and Macs. One flatmate of mine and a close friend both had a failing HD in the MBP 13" unibody within the first year.

Ofcourse I realize that his is subjective and not representative for hard drives in general but I have the distinct feeling that it's occurring more and more with the newer, faster hard disks.

I'm curious for your thoughts on this?
 
A.W.E.S.O.M.-0 said:
Funny thing, everybody claims that all hd's will fail and that a back-up is more or less mandatory

First of all, let me confirm that back-ups ARE crucial for a lot of reasons.

However, I still have pc's working that have with harddrives that are easily over 10 years old without ever having encountered any problems. Same goes for the people around me, never heard them "back in the days" about failing hard drives and everybody in school had their own pc's.

The last three years however, I see and hear more and more of relative new hard drives that are failing all around me. Pc's and Macs. One flatmate of mine and a close friend both had a failing HD in the MBP 13" unibody within the first year.

Ofcourse I realize that his is subjective and not representative for hard drives in general but I have the distinct feeling that it's occurring more and more with the newer, faster hard disks.

I'm curious for your thoughts on this?
Click to expand...

well 10 years ago laptops were not as common as we have today. most of the hard drive failures today are with laptops (i have no evidence to back that up). laptops are lugged around tossed in the bags and consistently moved around. when you moving parts like hard drives things will get broken.
 
A.W.E.S.O.M.-0 said:
Funny thing, everybody claims that all hd's will fail and that a back-up is more or less mandatory

First of all, let me confirm that back-ups ARE crucial for a lot of reasons.

However, I still have pc's working that have with harddrives that are easily over 10 years old without ever having encountered any problems. Same goes for the people around me, never heard them "back in the days" about failing hard drives and everybody in school had their own pc's.

The last three years however, I see and hear more and more of relative new hard drives that are failing all around me. Pc's and Macs. One flatmate of mine and a close friend both had a failing HD in the MBP 13" unibody within the first year.

Ofcourse I realize that his is subjective and not representative for hard drives in general but I have the distinct feeling that it's occurring more and more with the newer, faster hard disks.

I'm curious for your thoughts on this?
Click to expand...


i find my failure rate is similar today as it was in the past.

I think maybe now that there are more computers and HDs in use the failures are more obvious among the larger user base.
 
AHDuke99 said:
Granted, it was my fault for not having a backup in place since August, but I live in cramped quarters, travel a lot, and never have the space to lug around my external HDs, and I thought I could rely on having a computer's HD work for more than 5 months before crapping out.
Click to expand...

I'm sorry to hear about your situation, but I have to agree with you that is was your fault for not backing up. Hard drives can go at anytime. With things like Time Machine, SuperDuper, CCC, etc., there is really no excuse for not having a backup solution for your Mac. External drives are small and cheap these days, so I fail to see how it's an inconvenience to carry one with you. I have multiple external drives, but always have at least one in my laptop bag with me.

Good luck if you go the data recovery route.
 
One thing is that hard drives tend to either fail within the first year or last for year and years and years, so just being new doesn't protect you from data loss.

Apple gives you a DVD burner and Time Machine, and there are lots of good online services that others have mentioned like Dropbox and Carbonite.

With regards to important data a rule of thumb that is often used by professionals is that a file doesn't really exist unless it exists in two places, if not three.
 
Ive had my share of data loss and HD failure. Around 1TB total of data i'll never see again (in my life).

Not more than 2 weeks ago, my external HD died on me. I guess it didnt like being in my backpack for the last fews months backpacking.

I was wondering... Would SSD fix this HD failing all the time hell ?

What is the lifespan of an SSD drive ?
Since there is nothing mechanical inside, i'd assume it would never fail. Am i right ?
 
Carbonite


And i'm sympathetic - i've had 3 drives fail this fortnight - some not backed up totalling >2 TB. :/
 
Punker said:
Ive had my share of data loss and HD failure. Around 1TB total of data i'll never see again (in my life).

Not more than 2 weeks ago, my external HD died on me. I guess it didnt like being in my backpack for the last fews months backpacking.

I was wondering... Would SSD fix this HD failing all the time hell ?

What is the lifespan of an SSD drive ?
Since there is nothing mechanical inside, i'd assume it would never fail. Am i right ?
Click to expand...

SSDs fail too. I had one of the first MacBook Airs and my SSD failed within two weeks of ownership.
 
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