Could I have damaged my hard drive?
Yesterday I was moving my router and cable modem around my desk, and, to make a long story short, some cables were tangled and a small desk lamp took a four-foot swan dive onto my MacBook Pro. The point of impact was about two inches below the keyboard and one half inch from the left side of the computer (it was open), resulting in a maybe 1/8" dent in the top case.
I didn't think much of it (other than "I'm an idiot" and "I wonder ho much top cases go for on eBay) until about an hour later when my computer froze up. After a minute or so of rainbow pinwheel, it went to the blank blue screen. After staring at this for a minute or two, I went for a manual power down. Unfortunately, when I tried to boot up again, I couldn't get past the gray screen with the apple logo and the spinning wheel graphic. I tried running Disk Utility and repaired my permissions to no avail. Then I tried archiving and reinstalling to try to fix the issue, but each time it would hang up in the "Copying Base Files" (or something like that) stage at a given percent and go no further. It was at this point that one of my roommates pointed out some strange noises, and they were estrange indeed: Clicking and popping sounds coming from the hard drive area, along with intermittent spooling up and slowing back down.
Starting to fear the worst, I picked up a FireWire cable this morning (I can't believe how hard it so to find those things) and ran Target Disk on a Mac Pro in a nearby computer lab to try to rescue some of the essentials (I am lazy and have not backed up in about a month). I noticed as many partial installs as times I had attempted to install OS X, and a corresponding number of archived files. While most of my files copied fine, a few gave me an error that read like this:
"The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in "Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata" could not be read or written. (Error code -36)"
I tried running Hardware Test from my install DVD, and both the regular and extended tests came back with "No trouble found."
Based on the facts that the computer took a sudden impact directly above the hard drive, the drive itself seems to be hanging up when being written to at certain points, and some of the data seems to have been damaged (not to mention the "click pop" soundtrack when the drive hangs up), my guess is that the hard drive might need replacing. I have a fair idea of what I'm doing and have no problem doing a little open-Mac surgery (not to mention the fact that 7200rpm 200GB+ drives are now under $100- when did that happen), but Id really like to be able to confirm that this is the problem. I have never actually had to troubleshoot hardware issues like this. Is there something else that I can run, or is it a pretty safe bet that the drive is trashed?
Later this afternoon I'm going to drag the 300GB external down to the lab, restart target Disk, and copy as much as I can, but i think with the errors I've been seeing it's a safe bet that much of it is trashed. After that ,I'm going to make a last-ditch effort to reformat the drive and do a clean install, but I'm betting that it will either hang up partway through the erasing process, or get stuck on the writing side like it did with the archive and reinstall.
Any advice you can offer will be greatly appreciated. As a student, I'm sure you can imagine the urgency here.
Message was edited by: anthonyhemming
Yes, I too fear the bluing and tattooing to be the case.
If it helps, I just remembered that I also reset my PRAM and SMC somewhere along the way.
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