Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

*URGENT* Another hard drive about to Die?

comda

comda

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 15, 2011
619
85
So long story short my Friends father has this 2012 macbook Pro model identifier 9,1 and it has been beach balling, crashing freezing lagging all the time. Its running OSX lion. We had it taken to the apple store and running apple diagnostics test and found that the OS had some corruption. The technician recommended a format reload and then the backup was taken from the time machine backup. That was on monday. It worked fine for a bit and then began to beach ball freeze and refuse to save word documents asking them to be renamed.

I ran a disk utility hard drive check on it and it gave me the errors in the photo. Then we ran another one today and everything appears to be fine. THis machine has applecare on it and although the technicians say the drive was fine, i fear it may be slowly on its way out. What do you think? should we go back and ask for a new drive?

Thanks let me know. WE need this machine bac up and running ASAP. All help is appreciated.
 

Attachments

  • IMG_20150116_224238.jpg
    IMG_20150116_224238.jpg
    1.5 MB · Views: 110
But would you agree that this is a possibly hard drive failure? i was working on a document again and when trying to save it gives me an error saying its being used by another program and needs to be renamed.
 
comda said:
So long story short my Friends father has this 2012 macbook Pro model identifier 9,1 and it has been beach balling, crashing freezing lagging all the time. Its running OSX lion. We had it taken to the apple store and running apple diagnostics test and found that the OS had some corruption. The technician recommended a format reload and then the backup was taken from the time machine backup. That was on monday. It worked fine for a bit and then began to beach ball freeze and refuse to save word documents asking them to be renamed.

I ran a disk utility hard drive check on it and it gave me the errors in the photo. Then we ran another one today and everything appears to be fine. THis machine has applecare on it and although the technicians say the drive was fine, i fear it may be slowly on its way out. What do you think? should we go back and ask for a new drive?

Thanks let me know. WE need this machine bac up and running ASAP. All help is appreciated.
Click to expand...

Bad news, sounds like your drive is on the way out. As crummy as it is, it happens - hard drives have moving parts that make them vulnerable.

For Apple, standard practice is to try a reinstall if your having issues like that - by doing a reinstall it helps them eliminate a software based software bug as a possible cause. If you haven't done it yet, then they are going to pester you at the Apple Store until you do. If it still happens after a reinstall then the next step they will take is replacing the hard drive with a new one.
 
There's an entire diagnostic process that needs to be done here. Could be the drive, could be the cable (paper thin and prone to failure) or could be the logic board connector. If it's the later two, another drive (SSD or otherwise) won't help. Remove the drive from the machine and boot with it in an external enclosure or dock would be the first elimination step... If you can, run drive diagnostic software against the drive when not booted to it (e.g. Disk Warrior). Apple Store should do this (before or after a clean install, if issues persist).
 
So we took the laptop to apple, they replaced the drive and although we asked to install mavericks they installed Lion on it. Anyways. we then restored from time machine backup and everything seems to be running alright. Word still crashed on us, so i assumed it got corrupted and we reinstalled it.... But the errors still appear after a scan in disk utility... the computer runs fine whats up with that?
 
comda said:
So we took the laptop to apple, they replaced the drive and although we asked to install mavericks they installed Lion on it. Anyways. we then restored from time machine backup and everything seems to be running alright. Word still crashed on us, so i assumed it got corrupted and we reinstalled it.... But the errors still appear after a scan in disk utility... the computer runs fine whats up with that?
Click to expand...

Apple Store staff doesn't install anything on the hard drives, the drives are shipped to the service centres preinstalled and the EEE code determines which drive with which preinstalled OS is put in a machine for hardware replacement service.

I would still perform the drive test with the drive external to the machine, be sure it's not cable or connector.
 
G-Mo said:
Apple Store staff doesn't install anything on the hard drives, the drives are shipped to the service centres preinstalled and the EEE code determines which drive with which preinstalled OS is put in a machine for hardware replacement service.
Click to expand...

Really? the technician said it was no problem to install Mavericks and in an hour and a half we picked it up and it had an OS on it. Would a time machine restore also set back the OS?

G-Mo said:
I would still perform the drive test with the drive external to the machine, be sure it's not cable or connector.
Click to expand...

Thats what i wanted to do, but sadly i currently am not with them and i didnt want to take it apart really in fear of voiding the warranty. I suggested a clean install from no backup and manually transfer personal data.
 
comda said:
Really? the technician said it was no problem to install Mavericks and in an hour and a half we picked it up and it had an OS on it. Would a time machine restore also set back the OS?
Click to expand...

Really. The drives are either preinstalled to a default OS or blank to recover from TM.
 
One thing I am noticing is that, in all of these attempts, you have done a TimeMachine restore each time and that your problems begin to manifest after doing that. Generally, restoring any full system backup when there was known data corruption is a big no no. It is very possible that there is corrupted data in your TimeMachine backup that when restored will just cause the same problems to come back. Even possibly a kext or driver that causes the drive or SATA controller to misbehave. Maybe even damage the new drive.

I would wipe the drive and install a clean copy of whichever OS version you prefer. Then, instead of a TimeMachine restore (which brings over system and application files), use Migration Assistant to bring over only your documents and data from the TimeMachine backup. Then install fresh copies of your Applications.

This eliminates the possibility of restoring a corrupt system or application file that could be the cause of all your troubles. And, if the problem does come back after the clean install, at least you will know it is a hardware problem at that point.

When I worked the Genius Bar it was standard operating procedure that you never restored a running copy of a possibly corrupt system to a repaired computer. This approach should definitely be tried on your machine before anyone else spends more time chasing a hardware problem that might not exist.
 
Last edited:
sevoneone said:
One thing I am noticing is that, in all of these attempts, you have done a TimeMachine restore each time and that your problems begin to manifest after doing that. Generally, restoring any full system backup when there was known data corruption is a big no no. It is very possible that there is corrupted data in your TimeMachine backup that when restored will just cause the same problems to come back. Even possibly a kext or driver that causes the drive or SATA controller to misbehave. Maybe even damage the new drive.

I would wipe the drive and install a clean copy of whichever OS version you prefer. Then, instead of a TimeMachine restore (which brings over system and application files), use Migration Assistant to bring over only your documents and data from the TimeMachine backup. Then install fresh copies of your Applications.

This eliminates the possibility of restoring a corrupt system or application file that could be the cause of all your troubles. And, if the problem does come back after the clean install, at least you will know it is a hardware problem at that point.

When I worked the Genius Bar it was standard operating procedure that you never restored a running copy of a possibly corrupt system to a repaired computer. This approach should definitely be tried on your machine before anyone else spends more time chasing a hardware problem that might not exist.
Click to expand...

this is what i was thinking, but since this is technically a business computer and im not there it hasnt been done. I can still use the migration assistant to get stuff from the time machine backup?

T'hain Esh Kelch said:
Or even better - Actually do what it says in the dialog. :p
Click to expand...

Perhaps you didnt notice, i dont know because you didnt read it correctly, we did take it to apple... and replaced the drive and we are still having issues. I ask here kindly for assistance nothing more.
 
Replacing hard drive every time there is error is premature and unlikely to be done by Apple. I had hard drive errors pop up on me many times (across many systems I have). The worst offenders is SSD drive in my rMBP - until latest Yosemite installation, which I did clean install. SInce then, it has been rock solid. Go figure...

You need to boot in recovery partition (hold cmd-r immediately after you push power button) and run Diskutility from there, it can then fix the errors. If this fixes it and errors do not show (within reasonable time of may be few weeks), you are OK. If the errors show soon again, you have still problem, may be drive, may be cable, may be logic board. That is for Apple to solve. But drive with errors is common problem. Typical source (but there are many) is not orderly shut down, for example.

Now, if your MS Word crashes on close, it is not drive problem, it is Word problem which is around for ages now. MS solutions available on line are generally working for small fraction of users each (none for me). I gave up on this and live with Word crashing every time I quit it. If it crashes at other times, you may have drive issue.
By the way, MS products for OSX are annoying fragile and slow on OSX, 90% of my software problems are with the few MS products I have to use. Annoying - but I am slowly removing them one after another due to this issue.
 
comda said:
this is what i was thinking, but since this is technically a business computer and im not there it hasnt been done. I can still use the migration assistant to get stuff from the time machine backup?
Click to expand...

Yes. The difference between doing a restore from Time Machine and using Migration Assistant is that the restore literally restores a snapshot of your entire system. Migration assistant leaves the OS alone and only moves user documents and files. The Genius Bar should be able to assist you with Migration Assistant if you need it.
 
Honza1 said:
Replacing hard drive every time there is error is premature and unlikely to be done by Apple. I had hard drive errors pop up on me many times (across many systems I have). The worst offenders is SSD drive in my rMBP - until latest Yosemite installation, which I did clean install. SInce then, it has been rock solid. Go figure...

You need to boot in recovery partition (hold cmd-r immediately after you push power button) and run Diskutility from there, it can then fix the errors. If this fixes it and errors do not show (within reasonable time of may be few weeks), you are OK. If the errors show soon again, you have still problem, may be drive, may be cable, may be logic board. That is for Apple to solve. But drive with errors is common problem. Typical source (but there are many) is not orderly shut down, for example.

Now, if your MS Word crashes on close, it is not drive problem, it is Word problem which is around for ages now. MS solutions available on line are generally working for small fraction of users each (none for me). I gave up on this and live with Word crashing every time I quit it. If it crashes at other times, you may have drive issue.
By the way, MS products for OSX are annoying fragile and slow on OSX, 90% of my software problems are with the few MS products I have to use. Annoying - but I am slowly removing them one after another due to this issue.
Click to expand...

IT was 100% the drive as the system would freeze files refused to save etc. With the new drive im still getting errors in Disk utility both in Lion and recovery mode but nothings crashing or freezing anymore. The owner of the laptop is still worried about the errors showing up so come the weekend instead of doing a time machine restore i will be manually copying over his personal files installing mavericks then manually copying them back over.

Ive had my share of false errors, but when the machine is constantly freezing when the hard drive was working locking up then i have suspicion it was the drive. We believe that because he is using the same install it still shows drive errors. we want to get the hell off of 10.7 and start fresh

Its sad to say but ive had another hard drive fail this time my room mates. his 100Gb in his ancient Hp has crashed.. Guess who has been doing data transfers from what he can all day today?
 
Migration Assistant will basically do the same thing as manually copying the user data, but doing it manually might help you find any other corrupted files.

'sudo cp -r' is your friend if there are corrupted files as the copy from the terminal will just skip anything it can't copy without stopping. The Finder, not so much.

For your Windows buddy, I'd recommend Unstoppable Copier: http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=29

Good luck, and get your room mate to invest in some backup. :)
 
Alright but will migration assistant take the documents from the time machine backup?

As for my windows friend, I actually did take the drive out and used my Mac to copy his user folder off. He now has a 'new' used 80gb SATA hard drive and its updating windows now. Just shows hard drives are delicate. Second friend with a bad drive this week. I pray I'm not next.
 
comda said:
Alright but will migration assistant take the documents from the time machine backup?

As for my windows friend, I actually did take the drive out and used my Mac to copy his user folder off. He now has a 'new' used 80gb SATA hard drive and its updating windows now. Just shows hard drives are delicate. Second friend with a bad drive this week. I pray I'm not next.
Click to expand...

Yes. Migration Assistant will allow you to select a Time Machine backup as a source.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back