Both hard disks failed simultaneously?

[englishman]

I have a 2010 MP 2.8 and both hard disks seem to have failed according to WD diagnostics.

My SSD installation Bootcamp works fine.

I am seeking advice on what to test next.

AHT passes fine.

I have tried a hard disk from another PC and that seems fine.

Both disks also show failures if connected to another PC.

I have been worried that its a logic board issue but my tests seem to suggest its the disks.

It just seems very odd they have both failed at the same time.

Computer otherwise works fine.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Presumably, they were set up as separate drives, right (not a RAID setup)?

Could be an odd coincidence?

Could be that the cause was something that just got to both? Power surge? Moisture? Ants? Something else?

I'm guessing just odd coincidence. Assuming they are circa 2009-10 drives, about 7 years is a long time. I just replaced a 6-year old drive in one of my Macs because it started showing as "failing."

Once you get to a point where you might give up on them, you might try hooking them up to another computer and first aid or formatting them. Maybe they are just corrupted instead of (hardware) failed.

 

[AidenShaw]

Could be an odd coincidence?

Sometimes not a coincidence at all.

Large scale studies of disk failures show that one of the best predictors of whether a disk will fail is whether disks with nearby serial numbers have failed.

Some disks are just bad (I'm thinking of a recent case being the first generation of Seagate 3TB SATA drives).

For the "basically good" drives - failures are more random, and tied to transient supply or manufacturing issues (maybe the platters delivered during the 3rd week of July had more defects).

You need to look at sample sizes of hundreds to hundreds of thousands of drives to really see the pattern - but it's real.

 

[thornslack]

If you'd like further confirmation I often used Volitans free Smart Utility to test hard drives under OS X.

 

[englishman]

Thanks for all your replies.

Both disks are dated 27 Oct 2010 WD Caviar Blacks Apple Logo.

I only have the Bootcamp SSD which works fine which I dont really want to fiddle with.

I will get a replacement disk to install OSX on so hopefully that will solve it.

Will report back. >>>> Managed to resurrect one disk by full (as opposed to quick) formatting in Windows. Then OSX installed ok on it. And curiously the disk checkers show no errors now on it. This must somehow mark bad sectors in firmware or something. The other one still seems faulty. Its very, very slow even to go through disk checking software. But at least I now have a working OSX installation.

Thanks again.

 

[englishman]

If you'd like further confirmation I often used Volitans free Smart Utility to test hard drives under OS X.

Thanks - one that seems to be working and I am using to write this in OSX after reformat.

 

[thornslack]

Unfortunate

Good news is it looks like you have a window to recover some data hopefully. For the failed disk that isn't running it may be possible to recover data with disk warrior or some other program. I believe that's what I used when I accidentally reformatted my 2TB personal drive instead of my newly installed 2TB blank drive =/

 

[AidenShaw]

Thanks this is the 2 outputs from both drives - the one (1111) that seems to be working and I am using to write this in OSX and the other (New Volume).

View attachment 688744 View attachment 688745

That's super bad news. S.M.A.R.T. reporting "bad sectors" means "lost data".

If you are willing to go through a lot of work to save what you can, look at "ddrescue". You need to boot from a Linux CD ("live CD"). It can do a blind (filesystem independent) copy of the good blocks of a disk to a new disk. Blocks which can't be copied show up as zeroes in the new disk.

Mount the "new" disk in OSX, and save the important files. Most will be OK, but any that have "bad sectors" will have chunks of zeroes in them.

 

[englishman]

Thanks - I have all my data backed up on another computer and usb and off/online.

The worry was the possibility of the computer itself being at fault.

A replacement disk is the next step.