PB hard drive failing?

[zelmo]

Around 4.00a, I awoke to the sound of my PowerBook [15" 1.33GHz]. It was a drag-click, drag-click, sound, not quite plastic-y or metallic in nature, repeating every second or so. It continued until I held the power button long enough to shut down. Running disk utility, I got the message attached.

I will be backing up the contents of my hard drive shortly (been at least two months). I presume my drive is failing, but is there anything I should do to stave off failure? I'd love to be able to hold off long enough for those larger capacity perpendicular drives to come out.

 

[mad jew]

Keep running fsck 'til you get no modifications. Whilst it's possible to get those warnings and have fsck completely solve them, the clicking sound isn't promising. Hopefully it's not a failing hard drive (fingers crossed) but back everything up all the same, as you say.

 

[TMA]

I would back up before I use the computer again if I were you. Then follow mad jews suggestion.

 

[TLRedhawke]

If you select the physical hard drive in Disk Utility (not the Mac OS alias of it), at the bottom, it should list the SMART status of the drive. That's usually the best indication of whether the drive is failing. The error you've seen in Disk Utility can occur under a number of circumstances, whether or not the drive has failed.

 

[superbovine]

i just hope you make it through your backup...

 

[zelmo]

SMART status is "verified", but for some reason I am not comforted by that information.
I am using rsyncx to make a back-up on my ext fw drive at the moment. I'll feel much better when that is done, even though there wasn't much data at risk since my last back-up. Music was all on my iPod, and photos are backed up to DVD, so just a few non-critical files.

Once the backup is out of the way, I'll try out fsck and see what happens.

Can't decide between a 100GB 7200 and a 120GB 5400 drive, though. My current drive is only 4200 [60GB], but I can't say that I'm ever annoyed by the drive speed. I'm leaning towards the 120GB 5400, just because it'd be nice to have a little more space.
How much more of a performance boost would you think I'd get moving from a 4200 to 7200 rather than from a 4200 to a 5400 speed drive? I rarely run off the battery, and when I do it's usually for an hour or less.

 

[zelmo]

All backed up and fsck reported no drive problems [on the first pass]. Ran the Disk Utility again, and got a clean bill of health.

So, is there anything else I can do at this point to determine what the problem was/is, and then repair it? Am I merely waiting for the patient to die?

 

[mad jew]

I can't think of anything else to do, sorry.

The big speed bump will be the jump from 4200RPM to 5400RPM but then the jump up to 7200RPM will be less significant IMO. Unless you do a lot of heavy hard drive access work (video or music production/editing) then I'd say go for the 120GB drive.

 

[zelmo]

Thanks for the help and the moral support. Hopefully, the drive will hold until tax refund time, and those new perpendicular drives hit the shelves at the same time.
Until then, weekly back-ups.

 

[Superdrive]

Glad to hear you got everything saved. My practice, when it comes to HDs, is if it has failed once, it will fail again. Weekly backups sound like the right idea. Perhaps invest in a nice spool of CDs or use this as an excuse to get a MBP .

 

[iDM]

Thanks for the help and the moral support. Hopefully, the drive will hold until tax refund time, and those new perpendicular drives hit the shelves at the same time.
Until then, weekly back-ups.

perpendicular drives? Would you mind enlightening me?

 

[awulf]

Back in 2003, my 30GB 5400RPM hard drive in my Power Mac G4 was making that drag clicking sound, and I couldn't boot from it, I ended up plugging it into another Power Mac, and extracting the data from it. After a reformat the hard drive worked fine, and still does today.

But since then I have upgraded my primary hard drive to a 7200RPM 80GB, then 320GB, but the move from 5400RPM to 7200RPM gave a significant performance boost. I recommend you get the 7200RPM drive.

 

[superbovine]

Thanks for the help and the moral support. Hopefully, the drive will hold until tax refund time, and those new perpendicular drives hit the shelves at the same time.
Until then, weekly back-ups.

might have some luck with diskwarrior, but it doesn't sound like it.

 

[zelmo]

perpendicular drives? Would you mind enlightening me?

With perpendicular drives, the bits are aligned perpendicular to the platter as opposed to parallel, permitting a denser volume of storage. I recall reading somewhere (Engadget maybe?) that Toshiba (or someone) was going to have 2.5" laptop drives out in 2006 with a capacity up to 250GB. Will likely be damn pricey.