Friday, September 18, 2009

I'll be durned...

So, I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that my laptop's hard drive was completely hosed.  Try as I might to reinstall the OS, it kept failing and telling me the disk was too damaged to install on.  

So last night, just as one last, desperate hail Mary, I tried wiping the hard drive and doing a completely clean install.  And like the legendary Phoenix from the ashes, my laptop breathes again! Did a scan of the disk with Disk Utility and it made no indication of damage to the drive itself.  I'm still a bit skeptical, but for the time being, I'm not going to sweat it.

3 comments:

Q Ball said...

I had a Powerbook HD go on me once -- it worked fine if I turned the laptop on its side like a book, but wouldn't work if I tried it normally. Fortunately, the on-the-side trick worked long enough to get my info off it.

All that to say, be cautious! Hard drives are fickle beasts.

Joshua said...

I don't know about Mac drives, but at least in the PC realm wiping the drive and starting anew usually works if a drive appears to "fail". (Unless the drive is rattling like gravel in a hubcap.)

If it happens again, I would guess that it's a power supply issue or some other component and not necessarily the drive itself.

Anonymous said...

I work for Toshiba and repair laptops for them... This issue is something I see everyday all day long... Your hard drive is most likly starting to die. They can be uber finiky when they start to die, messing up here and there until finally they just dont work anymore... replace ur HDD and ull be fine I'd say.