Catastrophic hard drive failure! » November 17
Saturday
I was typing something up late on Saturday night when my computer froze. Usually, it’s just an application causing the stall but this time I had to turn the whole laptop off, and upon restarting it I came across this image:
I also heard the noise of the hard drive having difficulty, a clicking followed by a zap sound. Very unsettling.
I put the Mac OS X Leopard installation disc back in and took a look at Disk Utility, only to confirm what I thought - the hard drive was unreadable. All my stuff, now gone. Annoying to say the least, expensive too.
The Cause
I came across an article which shed some light on what caused the hard drive to fail. Unfortunately, I’ve since lost the link. It stated that when a MacBook is put to sleep, rather than continue running with a small amount of battery like a Windows machine would, it write your current status to the hard drive and then goes to sleep. But it needs between 10 and 30 seconds to do this, so it’s recommended that you leave the laptop to do it’s thing before moving it. That’s probably what I did wrong.
Time Machine
All is not lost though. Since upgrading to Leopard about a month and a half ago, the first thing I did was bought an external hard drive to link with Time Machine, Apple’s new backup software.
I regularly work with my laptop hooked up to a monitor in my bedroom, so I usually have it plugged into my Time Machine device too. Everyone knows they should back their stuff up, but honestly it’s a pain in the arse to do. Time Machine performs a smart backup of my whole hard drive every hour.
A quick trip to Mplex this afternoon, £40 down for a new hard drive and a quick click of ‘Restore from Time Machine backup’ and I was back in business about 2 hours later. All my programs installed, desktop exactly the same and all I lost was what I did between Friday and Saturday night. I’ve essentially got my computer back to what I was like on Friday. Can’t tell you how reassuring it is to know that if anything goes wrong again, all it’s going to cost is a new drive. I won’t loss anything.
Dave Nov 17
had a similar experience recently. Torjan managed to penetrate my computer and I had to reboot the whole thing! Needless to say I had backed up almost everything but did loose a few recent pics we had taken. AVG picked trojan up but by that time the damage was done. Was looking at external hard drives for back up so might pick your brian when I see you next for some advice…..
Harrison Nov 17
Definitely sounds like a smart piece of kit - if you want a free, online solution DropBox is pretty good.