Having issues Hope I didnt trash my HD? Can You Help

[Dorfdad]

Been a Mac user for 3 years now NEVER had one problem that I needed to repair but today I noticed my machine acting slow I had to Command alt esc a few time and stop some apps that were hanging me up.

One time nothing happened so I shut it down (Hard) and than upon rebooting I was greeted with a progress bar along the bottom for about 3 mins and it just stopped. I rebooted again same thing except no bar this time

I than tried Option S I thin (Single user mode) and got a command line and was able to see my user folders I did an LD Desktop and verified my files were there so I rebooted again and nothing.

Did this about 10 times tried booting into OSX install disk but the the option for repair verify HD were greyed out.

I booted into an external OSX partition I had on a USB drive and am typing this right now while I am trying to run a Disk Utility (Verify and repair has been about 30 mins and its says its running but I dunno)

Does anyone know a way for me to get a few files off the drive? I think by turning off the system when it was frozen I corrupted the HD partition or something. I don't mind formatting and reinstalling but ther are a few little files and some concert tickets on the desktop I would like to backup..

Any Advise?

Dorf

Thanks in advance!

 

[skh]

you could always try putting the drive in an enclosure if you're positive you can't boot from it

 

[Dorfdad]

Well I spent about 4 hours last night trying to fix it. Ran diskwarrior, Zeroed out the drive etc.. Was able to get it to boot finally but it was slower and acting wanky.. So I decided to grow a pair and replace the HD myself (i have some skills) I have it apart now I need to go grab a new HD and see what happens

It seems the HDD was dying and had bad sectors all over the place!

Dorf

 

[Hellhammer]

http://guides.macrumors.com/Mac_doesn't_boot

 

[Dorfdad]

yeah thanks I read that last night nothing helped. The Drive itself is bad.. Cant fix that. Im heading to Best Buy they have a 500gb SATA2 32cache WD (green) for 49.99

Is there anything special I need to do besides put it in and have osx partition it etc? I know on PC we fdisk and format etc do I need to do anything like that on MAC?

 

[Hellhammer]

yeah thanks I read that last night nothing helped. The Drive itself is bad.. Cant fix that. Im heading to Best Buy they have a 500gb SATA2 32cache WD (green) for 49.99

Is there anything special I need to do besides put it in and have osx partition it etc? I know on PC we fdisk and format etc do I need to do anything like that on MAC?

Just put it in and and boot from install disk and it should format it to HFS+. If not, then open Disk Utility from Menu Bar and format it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled)