Son's MBP hard drive dying?

[graylocks]

my son's MacBook Pro is on the fritz. he sent me an iphone video of what it is (or isn't) doing:



he thinks it's this problem here. which may involve a nuke and pave.

of course there's no back ups; the only thing he cares about saving is his music library. do you think a hard drive in this condition will start up in target disk mode? i'm hoping we can grab his itunes lib before attempting any repairs. i'd stash it on my MBA temporarily. i think it's about 32GB.

[graylocks]

just realized that that apple support page he found is for 10.6. he's on ML; wonder if it still applies?

[C(-)ris]

Same in ML. At the very least it has directory damage, the cause could be a bad hard drive.

Backup everything, right away. Then erase the drive doing a 1 pass erase and see if it can complete that. If it does, reload the OS and manually migrate his files over.

[graylocks]

C(-)ris wrote:
Same in ML. At the very least it has directory damage, the cause could be a bad hard drive.

Backup everything, right away. Then erase the drive doing a 1 pass erase and see if it can complete that. If it does, reload the OS and manually migrate his files over.

if we can erase and reinstall - is the hard drive trustable or should we think about replacing it? is this something that would be covered under Apple's warranty? he's one month out of that but the Amex card i purchased it with extends the coverage an additional year.

this may have to wait a day. need to order a FW 800 cable to do the target disk mode back up attempt.

[GGD]

Has he tried booting into the Recovery Partition and running Disk Utility from there? (cmd-R, or Option Key at power-on)

http://www.apple.com/osx/recovery/

[graylocks]

GGD wrote:
Has he tried booting into the Recovery Partition and running Disk Utility from there? (cmd-R, or Option Key at power-on)

http://www.apple.com/osx/recovery/

i love you!!!! trying it now.

[C(-)ris]

graylocks wrote:
[quote=GGD]
Has he tried booting into the Recovery Partition and running Disk Utility from there? (cmd-R, or Option Key at power-on)

http://www.apple.com/osx/recovery/

i love you!!!! trying it now.
The bar on the screen is the visual indication that the background process for Disk Utility is already trying to repair the disk. If that bar keeps coming back, disk utility can't fix it, but at least you will get to see the error message.

[graylocks]

update: the Recovery Partition booted but Disk utility was not able to repair. is there any way from within Disk utility to copy the contents of the hard drive via USB.

at least this seems to indicate that it can be started up and thus Target Mode will work.

[GGD]

What sort of error messages did Disk Utility indicate? Could be something that Disk Warrior can handle.

You can sort of do a copy using he Disk Utility User Interface *IF* the drive is in some condition where Disk Utility is at least able to Mount it.

From Disk Utility's "File" menu select New>Disk Image From Folder.

Then navigate to the folder you want to back up, and after that you'll need to navigate to where you want to save the Disk Image on the USB drive. This will create a Disk Image backup of the folder, that you should be able to open on another Mac. Try it first with a small folder to get the process worked out.

If Disk Utility can mount it and you can navigate through folders, then it's also likely that Target Disk Mode will be able to mount it.

Terminal commands would be another option, but that's getting a bit complex.

[graylocks]

the error message said to back up as many files as possible, erase the hard drive, and reinstall. i am not able to mount the disk.

i'm going to order a FW 800 cable from Amazon that will be here tomorrow. i think terminal is above my pay grade and would take it to the Apple store before going there if there is Amex warranty coverage for this.

also, i do intend to run Disk Warrior but i need to upgrade my copy first.

my son thinks this forum is awesome for knowing about the Recovery Partition. he's right!