HD Problem? Need Help...

[Franget]

Only the basic stuff in my dock is running right now and my Windows is running fine too (intel) But my desktop is absolutely empty right now, I'm trying to use diskwarrior again(error with detecting folder differences), I already erase-installed so many times. At first it started with freezing after I let the computer sleep overnight. Then I had to force restart it. It was like this on and off for a week, so I backed everything up to an external drive using time machine. Then it got worse, I started having grey screens and after a battle of trying to get the OSX CD to work I was finally able to erase-install osx again. I started fresh, I even ran Disk Warrior to keep things clean. Eventually things got worse again, Disk Warrior then got stuck with overlapped files, I gave up after over an hour, I read that issue could last days to weeks but I didn't have to recover anything. I had to erase and install again. This time carefully placing files back on one at a time. I kept rebuilding the disk with DW because of all the errors and checking Disk Utility for errors, but the Hard Drive seems to be perfectly fine all of a sudden. I only had a few things on my computer and it worked well for the day until it froze on me and now I'm stuck again this time without a desktop. When I click system pref. it is like it is sliced in half with no programs inside but I can check my email and surf the web using dock...

Any programs out there that could possibly clean the disk from all the mess? I think the Hard Drive is OK but it is kind of messed up with all of the force shut downs and the rebuilding... Any suggestions would help, because this could only get worse....This feels like a virus or something. Suggestions will help.

 

[sickmacdoc]

Well, I for one would not be nearly as sure as you are that the problem does not involve a hard drive with intermittent problems. With the difficulties Disk Warrior has had with it on several occasions (I have never had DW fail on a properly functioning drive) and the other problems you have described, it really sounds more like flaky drives that I run into relatively often. They are not completely failed, but usually have periodic problems in the interface/drive controller boards attached to each, leading to a frustrating series of things like you have described.

Particularly of note is the fact that you said at one point it seemed to be fine, which it apparently was-- for the time period right up to the next time it glitched! I can only say that that drive would sure not be giving me the confidence that I think a user needs to store data and expect it to be accessible in the long term.

Just my two cents- with the price of hard drives lately, I would suspect that a drive replacement is in order.