Dead hard drive?

[alxths]

I'm pretty sure my hard drive has kicked the bucket, but I just wanted to get another opinion before I buy a new one.

About a week ago my system would start hanging intermittantly, particularly when I opened a new program. Sometimes when it got particularly bad I would hear a brief, high-pitched beep come from the hard drive. I backed up my important data and sat and waited as this basically continued for another week or so. I was recently trying to update mac os, after which it rebooted, which seems to have sent it into a coma because it won't boot up now... Initially I'd get to the Mac OS startup screen and the blue bar would goto full, but now it won't even go past the gray screen.

I've tried fsck -fy, and it gives me about 10 lines of errors.. "invalid forward link" and "input/output error"

Also, my optical drive is also toast (happened a couple months ago), so I can't try anything related to booting with a CD.
Any thoughts? Or if anyone has any suggestions on last ditch things for me to try it'd be appreciated.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Knowing which Mac would be helpful.

New hard drives are relatively cheap. Even if yours is only wounded and not terminal, I would not want to trust my data to it. Beeping, buzzing, thunking and grinding mechanical sounds are never good... and these problems do not fix themselves.

You may be able to resurrect your b0rked directory structure with software like DiskWarrior, but if the underlying cause is a bad sector or an unreliable mechanism, it will occur again.

You pretty much have to have a functioning and bootable DVD drive for any installs, look into replacing that as well. If it is a desktop machine, check www.xlr8yourmac.com for their compatibility database of third party optical drives.

 

[deadpixels]

you can boot your machine using an external hard drive if you have one then re-install the OS as a last try or run disk warrior from there.

 

[alxths]

Knowing which Mac would be helpful.

New hard drives are relatively cheap. Even if yours is only wounded and not terminal, I would not want to trust my data to it. Beeping, buzzing, thunking and grinding mechanical sounds are never good... and these problems do not fix themselves.

You may be able to resurrect your b0rked directory structure with software like DiskWarrior, but if the underlying cause is a bad sector or an unreliable mechanism, it will occur again.

You pretty much have to have a functioning and bootable DVD drive for any installs, look into replacing that as well. If it is a desktop machine, check www.xlr8yourmac.com for their compatibility database of third party optical drives.

Thanks.

It's a 1GHz Powerbook.

I actually managed to get my optical drive working through what I can only assume is voodoo magic. I've got disk utility doing it's thing atm.. I think in either case, I'll get a new HD though. You're probably right about the problem resurfacing even if it's ok for the moment.

 

[MBPmad]

Thanks.

It's a 1GHz Powerbook.

I actually managed to get my optical drive working through what I can only assume is voodoo magic. I've got disk utility doing it's thing atm.. I think in either case, I'll get a new HD though. You're probably right about the problem resurfacing even if it's ok for the moment.

Lucky you.
I while ago I replaced my friend's Powerbook HDD and combo drive, using the ifixit guides as reference. http://www.ifixit.com/

I had a hard time removing the supports of the hard drive, just don't use too much force.

The machine became very snappy after the update. (Well, it also has over 1 Gig of RAM).

Good luck with your machine.

-MBPmad