Laptop's HD is making grinding noises and clearly dying. Please advise on heat / turning off strategies as I try to help it survive last backups?

Download an ISO of Parted Magic, and burn it onto a CD. Now take your external hard drive, and boot from the CD. Use CloneZilla to make a partiton clone of your hard drive to your external.Use the partition editor to make a partition the size of your drive on the external. Clone the main partiton from your built in drive to the external, running windows when a drive is this bad only makes it worse, and this way you have a total clone of your drive. I just did this yesterday to save my laptop.

Choose local disk to local disk, and local partition to local partition, and make sure you choose the right ones!

I would keep it running. Restarting thrashes the disk as it loads the hundreds of thousand little files that make up the Operating System. Just cross your your fingers. I’m betting that heat is a byproduct of mechanical failure so keeping it cool doesn’t really fix the underlying problem.

Thanks XOIIO, but it’s a Mac (10.6).

Thanks johnpowell, that makes sense! I am about 70% through a full backup… I think I’ll make it. :)

I also bet you’re right that the heat is a result of mechanical failure. I’m guessing maybe my fans died, making my drive finally bite it (it has made it five years, and it had a tough life of travel!).

Are you just manually moving things over or using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner?

I’m the resident Mac nerd around these parts.

Download smcFanControl and use that to manually turn up your fan to keep your comp cooler.

Also, what kind of temperatures are you talking about, and what is it that’s overheating, the HD?

Thanks, clearly you are because I remember your great answer to my last question about matte screens.

So, I copied everything manually because I wanted to do the most important-to-me stuff first in case it actually died right in the middle of copying. Eventually I successfully copied everything in my user folder, plus the app installers I care about that don’t come with Mac OS. It made it through okay and I have successfully shut down and restarted once so far. When it spun up, it sounded okay then slowly restarted from faint clicks gradually into more grindy sounds, so I know it’s not long for this world. It’s a 5+ year old MBP that I was already thinking of replacing with an Air. So I guess this is probably my last ever non-SSD HD. :)

Aqua, the whole machine is just generally super-hot to the touch on its bottom surface after it’s been running for a while, and the fans appear to be broken again because they’re not turning on at all (most recent Apple repair was for the fans too; at this point repair is less attractive than buying a new unit altogether, partly because it doesn’t meet the system requirements for the new release of the sw I use most).