Hard drive surface scan failed. Is it dead?
Asked by
leftspin (
56
)
August 31st, 2007
I just ran two surface scans using Tech Tools on my iMac G5’s internal drive. It came up with one error both times. Is it dead, or will reformatting it help it? Should I just give up on the drive? I have safely backed up everything on it. Just wondering what the next steps are.
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Just to expand a little bit, I’d like to have as little downtime as possible, so although I appreciate answers like “take it to Apple tech support”, I’d like to see if there’s anything I can do first, especially if the problem isn’t serious.
Did it fail and then you ran Tech Tools? or did you run Tech Tools and are thinking it might fail?
The journal was failing to write to disk (saw that in Console), and so I ran Tech Tools on it. The surface scan failed. I then used Disk Utility to clear the drive and re-ran Tech Tools. Same error.
I then called Apple Support but all they seem to be able to tell me is to run Disk Utility, and if it says the drive is okay, re-install the OS. That really makes no sense to me. I assume Disk Utility is checking the volume at a higher level (it’s definitely not doing a surface scan), so I don’t see how its results are necessarily relevant. Reinstalling the OS doesn’t seem wise to me.
Should I just shut up and do what Apple Support tells me to do?
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