Ticket Options

Question Profile

Question Details

TICKET ARCHIVE -> dead hard drive

bignellie - Nov 4, 2007 - 10:19 am

I am unable to boot from my hard drive. I am able to boot from cd-rom. When I run disk utility from cd-rom I cannot repair or verify my hard drive. When I try booting up normal I get a blue screen with a folder in the middle of the screen and a blinking question mark. Is my drive just dead? I do have a backup of the data. Should I just order a new drive and reload the OS?

Thanks.

Serenak - Nov 4, 2007 - 7:12 pm

Hello Corey

thanks for choosing to use macosx.com - I hope I can help you a little here.

The blinking question mark icon indicates that the Mac cannot find a valid system to boot from. The fact that you can boot from the installer but Disk Utility cannot apparently verify or repair the internal HDD would tend to indicate that the disk is toast...

There are other more powerful tools that might have more luck (DiskWarrior being one of the best) but in the longer term how safe would you feel trusting your stuff to a disk that has already given you a big problem? As you say you have a good back up I think I would be inclined to just buy a new bigger HDD and reinstall and restore from backup. Especially as HDDs are pretty cheap these days - if you have another Mac and a FW cable you could try starting the Mac in Target Disk Mode (hold down T on startup till you see a big FW symbol) and connecting it to another Mac where the HDD should show up as simply an external drive. From there you might be able to salvage some data or even have another go at repairing the HDD... or you could try wiping it using the Disk Utility and reinstalling - but for me the fear that it might fail again anytime would tend to put me off.

You don't state what brought this on... if it just wouldn't boot one day I would be fairly dubious of the disk... if it was brought about by something sudden such as a kernel panic then I might be more inclined to try to resurrect it.

(BTW I have brought apparently dead HDDs back by using a PPC version of Ubuntu to format the disk and then booting from the Mac OS installer and reformatting it back to HFS+. But this was on a Mac that I knew to be previously sound and had been crashed while doing a big copy from an ailing external drive).

Long and short of it is it is your call - and your cash - but I think I would be inclined to just replace the drive - it has to be a few years old now if it is the original from the iMac.

Good luck and glad to hear that you have a proper back up.

bignellie - Nov 7, 2007 - 12:20 am

Yeah I just slapped a new one in and rebuilt it. I checked out DiskWarrior but it is 100 bucks. I will continue to look for something cheaper since I already have a backup.

Thanks!

Corey