Hard drive back from the dead. Should I trust it?
October 29, 2009 6:42 PM

A week ago as part of a Snow Leopard install, I wanted to wipe and resize my boot camp partition. Disk Utility wasn't able to fix the file system, and recommended a reinstall from backup. A restore from backup later, and Disk Utility was still showing problems. Shortly after that, the disk stopped showing up in Disk Utility at all. Fast forward a week, I'm running off of a firewire spare, and the disk reappears again. I repartition the hard drive, double-check with Disk Utility and a SMART utility, and the thing seems to test clean and empty. So what do I do from here? The other bit of data is that I started a restore, and at 5%, it seemed like it wanted an extra hour to do it.

Perhaps I'm a bit stubborn, but are there other diagnostics I can run that might point to the nature of the problem? Or should I resign myself dismantling my iMac and just replacing it?
posted by KirkJobSluder to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)
Fool me once...

A hard drive that has failed you before is not to be trusted ever again. It's time to replace it.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:58 PM on October 29, 2009


Agreed. Once a hard drive has started to act up, the best thing to do is bin it. It's the worst thing that you can have fail, in terms of risking data loss, and they're so cheap today that it doesn't make sense to tolerate any unnecessary risk.

That said, there used to be a lot of more-advanced diagnostic tools that you could run to try and find out what was wrong with a flaky disk. TechTool Pro was a popular one that I used to use, DiskWarrior is another. Neither will fix hardware problems, of course, but DW in particular can fix a lot of corruption issues.

Personally, I haven't used DiskWarrior since I started doing nightly backups and generally being more careful with my data (e.g. I never have digital photos stored in less than two places; I don't delete them from a memory card until they're in Aperture and Aperture has backed itself up to a second hard drive). It's just not worth the time to try and rebuild a disk if you have a backup that's only a few hours old to restore from instead.

As soon as a disk starts having intermittent failures, it goes to the drill press and then to the garbage, no exceptions.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:10 PM on October 29, 2009


Thanks, that's about what I expected.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:19 PM on October 29, 2009


I agree, don't trust it.. replace the drive...

and, the phrase "it goes to the drill press and then to the garbage" is now embedded in my brain... but it may forever be associated with "Silence of the Lambs" for some reason...
posted by HuronBob at 7:28 PM on October 29, 2009


I'm going to dissent here. If you fire up Disk Utility, and blank the drive with all 0s (one of the security options), and the drive takes a format without blocking off bad sectors or making any noise I'd call it good.

The advice above mine is fine too, but I don't see a reason to distrust the drive because of one issue. If the drive causes other problems, yeah bin it, but it sounds to me like you were messing around with the drive enough that the Disk Utility app could have just puked.

You could always throw that drive into a cheap external case and use it as secondary storage for things you don't care about (like downloaded files you can always get again).
posted by cjorgensen at 8:08 PM on October 29, 2009


CJorgensen, if drives cost $1000, it might make sense to do what you're saying. But you can get a terabyte drive now for less than $100. It doesn't make any sense to take the risk, even if it's a remote one.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:19 PM on October 29, 2009


It's junk. Take it behind the barn as soon as possible. SMART, by the way, is not to be trusted.
posted by chairface at 5:14 PM on October 30, 2009


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