hard drive dying?

cj171cj171
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hi, I've got a powerbook that's a few years old but still in pretty good shape. One major annoyance is almost every time I reboot it recently, it wants to check the disk. Then I reboot and so fsck in single user and it usually finds a problem or two to fix. Occasionally but more frequently now I need to run disk warrior to get it to boot. Can this be an indication of an impending death? or something else?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,326moderator
    Maybe not total failure but it could mean some corruption on your filesystem. I would backup and try a zero erase which will ignore bad blocks on your drive then reinstall. Get an external hard drive to make this process much easier. Even if you don't want to do that, get a drive for backup in case something does go wrong.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    cj171cj171 Posts: 144member
    so cloning to an external wouldn't fix the corruption?
  • Reply 3 of 3
    benzenebenzene Posts: 338member
    No, the disk blocks themselves are unstable, leading to corruption. Cloning it to an external drive will just freeze the blocks in their (potentially) corrupted state.



    Still, having a partially corrupted copy is better than an unusable disk. I'd copy it as soon as possible (i.e. right away).
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