MBP Failing Hard Drive

Question

My late 2007 15" MBP seems to be having a hard drive on the edge of failure. Coincidence or not, it comes the day after the Apple Store replaced my logic board because of the NVidia card failure associated with the black scrren of death. No indications of hard drive problems prior to the repair, but now upon booting it takes almost 10 minutes to boot, and there is now a progress bar below the spinning wheel on the startup screen which I had never seen before. I also had a brief period where the keyboard stopped working. When I returned to the Apple store today, they first thought it was a keyboard issue and were going to replace the keyboard, but then they diagnosed it as a hard drive problem. It could be as simple as needing to repair damaged permissions, or could require a full restore of the drive. Before doing anything, I wanted to bring it home and make sure everything was backed up. Had been using TM for backups to my Time Capsule, but keep getting messages that the TC is full - thought it was supposed to delete older backups as it needed room for new ones.
Anyway, I also bought a new 2TB HD to backup to, and tried doing so using Super Duper. It got started, then after what was about an hour of backing up it appeared to freeze up - the progress bar still was shimmering, but not moving and the amount of files examined/backed up was no longer changing. Stayed this way for about an hour. I tried to quit the few programs running, but everything was locked up and even force quitting did not work. Had to do a hard restart of the MBP again. Am now trying to do a TM backup to the new HD.
What I need to know most is how can I backup as efficiently as possible while avoiding having to keep restarting the MBP? Would booting from the OSX disk help out? If need be I can take the hard drive out of the MBP and put it in an external case and then try to access it from another Mac. Just want to get the files fully backed up and then go about figuring out the HD, which by the way is only one year old as I replaced the original HD last year.

Answer 1

dan weisberg wrote:
I'm not sure what you are basing any of your suggestions on. First you say that no third party file repair utilities are worthwhile, which is contrary to many suggestions made, including by tjk in this thread. Then you conclude the drive has failed - has there never been a drive that needed permissions repaired and then worked fine. By the way, just finished repairing drive with Disk Warrior, and except for 12 files that seem rather unimportant, the directory was rebuilt and the drive seems to be functioning, with all data still in place.
You noticed. This has been an ongoing thing with a certain person. I'm not going to bother getting into it with said person yet again. One point this person makes that I agree with is that money can be better spent on backups ahead of issues (and anyone who values any of their data needs to back it up); then, if/when HD hardware issues occur, the HD can simply be replaced for less than the cost of a utility (which certainly cannot resolve all HD issues), and restore/clone back from backup. But I still believe there are plenty of times these utilities come in handy, and I'm sure glad someone produces them.
I've seen this attitude in most career IT people I've met, and I do understand it. Given the time/energy/repair person's wage, it's almost always less expensive to simply replace the HD (I'd like to have all the HDs our IT dept throws out, before they "throw" them in the trash/bash them around; I'd bet many of them are in working order). I just wish they'd understand that we're not all repair techs, these are often our personal machines, too many people do not have adequate backups, and some of us actually like tinkering with things like this (which is the main reason I'm here ). I get satisfaction out of reviving things that others have written off, and given the state of resources on this-a-here planet, I wish more people would adopt a "repair instead of replace" attitude in this "throw-away" society; RRR=Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order (steps off soapbox ).
As far as this drive's issue being caused by its hardware failing, that has yet to be seen. All that said, I would keep an eye on it for awhile before trusting it to a normal degree. It certainly could turn out that the HD is indeed dying, and not to state the obvious, but all HDs kept in use will die at some point.