so lately programs in my computer have frozen a lot and i get the beach ball often in safari. i just had my logicboard replaced because of flickering by Apple so i know its probably not that. so could this be a failing hard drive?
View 11 RepliesMy PM G5's Hard Drive has been making wierd noises lately and I'm really beginning to worry that it's failing. How can I be sure?
View 1 Replies View RelatedMy 1.5 year old MacBook pro has what I believe is a failing hard drive. What is the likelihood apple will replace the drive? It should still be covered under the manufactures warranty.I just think that 1 year and a few months is a little early for a drive to fail...
View 8 Replies View RelatedHowever, my hard drive appears to be running fine - haven't noticed any degradation of performance since receiving the warnings two days ago. And HD is still running quiet (no strange mechanical noises I'm accustomed to hearing prior to a failure). Nevertheless, I'm installing a new HD tomorrow and recloning it from a backup external drive (operating from external until then).
View 4 Replies View RelatedI just got a notice that my hard drive is failing. I can't access any of the data on it.I posted a picture of my problem here:[URL]I totally out of luck?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI just got a new WD external drive to put some media files on. I went into disk utility just to make sure the external was working fine before I started moving things over and it told me my internal hard drive in my 08 iMac is failing! Good thing I bought the external when I did,
View 6 Replies View RelatedI have a brand new MBPro15. The SMART status says I have a failing 7,200 RPM HD. Apple sent me a DIY for replacement. I am unable to run time machine for a backup. It receives and error each time. Most likely due to the failing HD. I was able to get all my important files backup to an external HD. Except for all my bookmarks, calendars, settings, etc. I do have a .Mac account with sync. I am hoping I can pull that data off and onto the new OSX. Is that possible? IS there any other way to transfer this important info before I replace the HD with the new one? Can I just make a clone of my current HD and put the OSX on the new HD? Or is a best to do a clean install, than transfer important settings and bookmarks?
View 1 Replies View RelatedMy friend has a black Macbook that is extremely slow. It takes about 10 min. to boot up (literally), and when it does finally boot up, the good ol' beach ball comes up whenever I click on anything to do anything.
I then tried hooking up to a new iMac as a target drive. I was able to read some of the hard drive, but the User folder was empty, so I could not retrieve any of the data. Also, trying to access the target drive and trying to eject it made the new iMac slow way down.
And the hard drive was making a faint chirping sound, and then it turned into a crunching sound (much like that of the old 4200RPM hard drives of years ago).
I tried resetting the PRAM and also reset the power management. I also did a Safe Boot...all to no avail.
The DVD burner does not work. So, I could not do a hardware test or an archive and install. However, since the hard drive is most likely failing, an archive and install would not help any.
So, I'm guessing that the hard drive is going since the hard drives in Macbooks have been known to fail (it happened to a daughter of a friend of mine).
Is there a software out there that will allow me to retrieve the data from the drive? Trying to avoid having to go to a data recovery place.
I've recently attempted to install 2 sticks of 2GB RAM into my MacBook Pro, but unfortunately had jammed one stick in the lower RAM compartment (Apparently I forgot to enter it at 45�) and had a rough time getting it out.
The RAM stick is busted and had to replace it, but I'm quite sure the slot might suffered a bit.
What are the signs of RAM failure?
Lately, I've been having trouble with my optical drive. It used to read ISO CDs, which it no longer can do. I assumed that was a software issue. Now it's spit out two DVDs and can't read them.Â
I'm starting to worry that the drive is actually failing. Is there a test I can do before I decide the drive needs replacement? If it's some kind of munged software or firmware issue and I replace the drive, I'm gonna feel like a doofus.Â
I'm outside of AppleCare now, so if it needs replacing, I'm going to have to do it myself.Â
I just replaced the hard drive (now I have 1 TB!), but that was relatively simple. I've never replaced a laptop optical drive before.
Info:
MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2008), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
The Super Drive on my MBP seems to be completely busted, whenever I try to read a DVD or CD it takes the disc in, spins it around a couple of times and then ejects it again without ever coming up with any options as to what to do with the disc. Discs don't appear in Finder either. It's obviously failing to read the discs and ejecting them within 30 seconds.Â
Now I've searched for a solution and as a result I've reset the NVRAM to no avail, and also tried using a CD lens cleaner but that seemed to have no effect either, I guess maybe as it got ejected within just 30 seconds as every other disc does.Â
The next solution I've found online is to delete Finder's preference files. The files I'm supposed to delete are "com.apple.finder.plist" and com.apple.sidebars.plist", however neither of these files appear to exist on my computer. Â
I remember discovering the fault while my MBP was still in warranty but I rarely use the Super Drive so totally forgot about it and it's now out of warranty
Info:
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)
Laptop suffered wine spillage, now it won't boot up. Cleaned the logic board (+ gpu/cpu/heatsink) with isopropanol, rinsed with electronics cleaner (electrosolve), but still won't boot. There are some visible signs of oxidation, very very slight. Magsafe connector works, ac adapter light only comes on when connector is connected to motherboard. Also the motherboard gets slightly warm to touch when power is plugged in. When ac plugged in, the macbook won't start up. Couple of questions:
1) Anyone have a diagram of the a1181 logic board? (2.0ghz, core duo)
2) Anyone know how which pins to short on the keyboard connector to power up (in case the keyboard is the problem); remember reading it was the farthest left pins, can someone confirm?
I have a fairly new iMac that I upgraded to Snow Leopard a few months ago. It seemed to me that prior to that my external HD worked fine with Time Machine. Since then it is recognized for a short period of time when I connect it, then it disappears. I replaced it with a WD My Book. It worked perfectly for a month and now it has shut down. Has anybody had run into this before? I can't believe that every hard drive fails within a month in the same mysterious way!
View 7 Replies View Relatedmy friend of mine has a external Seagate 500gb firewire 400 drive. It is used for storing audio for his production studio and so has critical data on it. I was transfering some programs to him and plugged it into my Late 08 macbook pro. Everything went ok. The power cable came slightly loose which cause the lovely 'you failed to eject disc properly' error. It then would not mount on my macbook or his G5 (single 2ghz). We tried three different cables. Tried to see if Disk Utility would see it, nope. His other firewire drive mounts fine on both machines as does mine. The Seagate drive can be heard spinning up when the power is turned on. Seems to be a dead Firewire interface on the drive enclosure itself as nothing will mount when using the drive to daisy chain. I was thinking of opening the enclosure and installing the drive as a standard sata internal to get at the data. Warranty doesn't matter just the data.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI recently stopped at the store to see what the problem was with my disk drive and i was told that my disk drive is failing i bought my white macbook in 11/2008 and didnt purchase the extended warranty badtimes but the guy from said it would cost $250 for a new disk drive. Is it possible to buy the disk drive from somewhere else and install it my self??? Im just curious if its cheaper to do it myself or have apple do it
View 2 Replies View RelatedLast night I heard a couple of clicks and my G5 OS X 10.4.11 Boot Drive became unresponsive, Shutdown. Was able to install System on 2nd Internal. Launched DiskWarrior, which found the bad drive and made Preview Directory. Before had a chance to copy all more clicking started, so Shutdown. This AM swapped the drives in the bays so The Bad Drive is now in the Lower Bay. However now Diskwarrior does not see the damaged Drive nor does Disk Utility.
View 6 Replies View RelatedI've been having some problems lately and I assumed it may be related to my HD since it's been making a lot of creaking noises for a while. Its been freezing a lot and when I click on folders they won't open and the text underneath starts flashing. Yikes. I've never come across that one before so I started booting up off the slave drive. Well just now the same thing happened with the text flashing running off the slave. Could this somehow be related to the master drive failing or do I just have other bigger issues?
View 4 Replies View RelatedSMART status in my imac hard disk running Snow Leopard is failing. it is < 2 years old. No obvious issues with the machine.
View 1 Replies View RelatedHow do you get rid of dollar signs in Excel 2008. I see the $ symbol, but that only adds them. If I click it again, it doesn't remove them.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI am having issues with my memory. I keep getting warning signs that I don't have enough RAM to complete functions; however, my RAM status says it is OK. The ECC says disabled? Does that have anything to do with it?
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
I have had a look at previous Q & A and am satisfied that 1.5 GB ram is fine in the eMac however i would like to know what the symptoms would be if there was memory incompatibility.Â
There is a long story , here is the short version.... Basically things went into a frenzy, wouldn't even shut down. The (additional) memory wasn't put in at my place and the computer also had updates done by the other person, when it came back it was unbelievable.. and worrying... my son refitted the 2 sticks that were in it, still frenzy, thought it was wrecked, looked up book, did safe boot. after angonising minutes everything came back.
Gathered courage and we re installed the (new) 1gb alongside incumbent 512 and now things seem ok.Â
I don't believe the ram is /was faulty so something else went on.Â
The sticks that are in the machine are  512gb DDR SDRam PC3200U 30440 ( this was one of a matched pair)
1 gb  DDR SDRam PC 3200U 30330 ( this is the new one)Â
I felt i bought the 1gb carefully to be compatible. I do see there is a difference in the last number.Â
Info:
eMac G4 PowerPC, Mac OS X (10.5.8), Firefox 3.6.28
Got a new MBP last month to replace my white MacBook - loving it as an upgrade but one gripe - if I'm sat using it on my knee I regularly hear the "click" type noise of what I imagine is the protection of the hard drive because it thinks it is being dropped.
I never heard this on my old Mac and while it's not a huge issue it is a bit disconcerting, as though I'm being told off for moving it in a fairly responsible way.
I replaced my daughters drive in her Macbook last fall. The move went without any issue and she had an additional 100GB after the upgrade.
Now it appears the drive is dying. It won't boot to get to the login - it gets to the blue screen and mouse cursor in the upper left, then circular spinning countdown in the center, then repeat, then hang at the blue screen. I can hear the drive making a repeated winding/reading type of noise when it gets to the point where the login should be coming up.
Here's what I've done so far:
- I've tried booting off the Leopard disk and verified disk - it passed.
- I also repaired permissions - it repaired about 2 dozen and passed as well.
- I've reset the pram with no impact
- It won't boot in safe mode - keeps getting some flashing text at the top and won't complete the boot.
- I took the drive out and ran Spinrite 6 on it - it got to about 53% and it started making the noise like it was stuck at the blue screen at Leopard bootup. It ran for 3 hours and the drive eventually passed with nothing fixed and no errors found.
- I'm afraid to try an archive and install since I think the drive is failing
So here is what I'm going to do.
- Purchase replacement drive and do a clean Leopard install
- Put the existing failing drive in my USB powered enclosure
I don't have a time machine backup to work from.
Now my question is where is my daughters user data and system files? She is the only user on the Macbook. Once I find them and bring them over - barring any other issues - where do I put them on the new drive/Leopard install and make her desktop, user data, music, photos, network settings, and apps the same again - like it would be with an archive and install? Is it as simple as copying over a user folder or series of folders? What about user login - does it have to be the same or does that come with copying the folders/data over.
I have an aluminum unibody macbook from October 2008. I'm looking to upgrade the 160 GB hard drive inside to a 500 GB one I'm considering from Newegg. Would it be possible to migrate/copy/clone the entire contents of my current hard drive to the 500 GB one? I also have a section of my current hard drive partitioned for Bootcamp. Would this affect my ability to transfer everything over?
If this is possible at all, how can I go about doing so? If there are steps laid out somewhere, I'd appreciate a referral. Sorry if my question is a little elementary, but I did a search on these forums and also google and nothing really came up
Recently I bought 2 identical WD Scorpio Blue 1TB hard drives for my macbook pro 13 inch 2010. My aim is to replace the internal hard drive with one of the two I just purchased and use it as my system drive with Lion, Windows and Data partitions. And for the other hard drive I want to use it as a full disk back up for the internal drive (now 1TB hard drive). After I was done with setting up both windows and mac and data transfer, when I booedt into the recovery partition from the internal drive to clone the drive to the external drive, the disk utility gave me this error (Could not validate source - error 254). I also tried using Carbon Copy Cloner but it only could clone partitions, not the entire drive. Yesterday I downloaded a copy of Clonezilla. It worked fine until it had to clone an exFAT partition (my data partition). The exFAT partition appeared as 'RAW' partition in clonezilla. As a result, the whole partition appeared to be full and clonezilla had to copy every single blocks of data in that partition and the estimated time remaining was about 30 hours. So clonezilla is out too. Just want to ask if there is any program/application (bootable or not) which allows can do a full disk clone to an external hard drive.
View 1 Replies View RelatedMacbook Pro 17" Early 2011Â
Notes. Failed HDD ASD Test.  A new hard drive was installed in September of 2011 after the previous hard drive failed. Having worked well until now the system seems to give the same problems as it had previously. I am wondering if this is a compatibility issue as others have pointed out. Â
I have been told by the technician my only option is to replace the entire hard drive again for the second time with a new one. However to my understanding a ASD test is very specific and this my not be necessary? Further I am attempting a final backup just in case. I don't have to take it in where I could just back it up myself without the system shutting down.
Info:
Mac Pro
I'm replacing my old 120gig hard drive with a new 320gig hard driveWhen Ive got the new hard drive installed can I just put the old hard drive in a enclosure kit/caddy and copy my music/movies/etc across to the new hard drive?Or do I have to copy the data off before I remove the old hard drive?
View 3 Replies View RelatedToday I went to plug in my Lacie 250 GB USB external hard drive into my 13 in. MacBook to get a shirt template for a design I am making. I discovered that the hard drive just would not mount and show on the desktop, and I remembered that this happened a few days before, but all I did was unplug it and plug it back in, and it worked... except that today, that didn't work at all. I tried the other USB port, and the hard drive showed up on the desktop for about a second, and then disappeared. I kept on replugging it back into both USB ports, but nothing happened.
Then I tried to see if it would work on the PC beside me, and it was recognized as an external device; however, a message came up telling me the drive was malfunctioning. I am guessing this is from ejecting it incorrectly (because I am in a hurry to head to my next classes...I use this laptop at school), but I have incorrectly disconnected it before in the past and this problem never happened to me before.
Every single project I have ever created for my design career is on that hard drive, and all I want now is to get my files back. All I need it to do is show up on the desktop for just the right amount of time for me to copy my files onto my computer.
I read online to put it into the freezer for a while and it should mount, but that didn't work. I tried using Disk Warrior, Data Rescue 3, and Tech Tool Deluxe, but the hard drive did not show up on any of those apps.I tried plugging the hard drive into an iMac as well, but it did not show up either.
I bought a new 500GB WD hard drive for my Late 2008 MacBook to upgrade from my 250GB drive. I have a hard drive enclosure, but I was wondering if when I install my 500GB hard drive, would I be able to use the enclosure to transfer files from my 250GB drive? I hope this was specific enough to get a clear response. If not, I'll try re-wording my question.
View 7 Replies View RelatedMy PowerBook G4 (Alum) died. I've had it for 4 years, taken it with me to Alaska and all over the lower 48, and have had nothing but happy experiences. I knew she was gonna go, but I was hoping she'd hold on until I could afford a MacBook. Alas, no. The problem appears to be the ability of the logic board to communicate with the hard drive. I can hear the HD spin, but even with Disk Warrior, I cannot locate it. The Mac Geniuses at my local Apple store confirmed this and gave me a shoulder to cry on. I've run Disk Warrior, Disk Utility, and tried finding it using the target disk mode - no luck.
The problem is that I've got 4 years of teaching materials, 6000 songs, and irreplaceable pictures on the HD, so I can't bring myself to just trash it. It's true that you only fail to back up you stuff once. This is my once. I've heard that with PC hard drives, you can just drop the old HD into a USB HD box and use it as an external HD. I can't afford professional data retrevial, and I want to give this option a try if it'll work with a Mac HD. Any ideas or suggestions?
