W520, hard drive, lots of bad blocks

Hello Everyone,
I've noticed that my hdd become very slow. I checked SMART status and it seems there are a lot of bad blocks:
"197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 0x5121000011d8"
4568 bad blocks, yesterday I saw only 4550, so as you can see number is increasing.
Question: Could it be replaced by warranty?
Thanks, Artem.

If the hard drive came with the system and you are within your warranty period, then yes. It can be replaced under warranty.
Thinkpad W530, i7-3720QM, 1920x1080 screen, 32GB RAM, dual SSDs (Samsung 830, Crucial M4 mSATA), Quadro K2000M, 9-cell battery, DVD burner, backlit keyboard, Bluetooth, Intel 6300 wireless card

Similar Messages

Powerbook hard drive has 384 bad blocks -- replace?

I just ran techtool pro on my powerbook and it found a bunch of bad blocks. I read that if you have more than 5 bad blocks you should repair or replace the drive. But when I ran disk utility to repair it I got a message that the drive appears to be fine. The question is this; do I really need to buy a new drive?

When you go into disk utility, does the SMART status say failing? If so, replace the drive now. If you don't have it, you might want to install SMARTReporter which puts in icon on the menu bar which indicates the SMART status. It's available at http://www.corecode.at/smartreporter/
You should be making frequent backups and use TechTool to examine the drive on a regular basis. If the count increases, get a new drive.
One thing you can do is to erase your hard drive, using the security erase feature which writes zero's on the hard drive. This also maps out the bad sectors so the system won't try and use them.

Would the ir censor go bad if the hard drive cable went bad sens they bout use the same cable?

what happend was that i have an intel ssd 80GB. i was installing a water colling system to my tower so i had to unplug my ssd. ones i had installed my water cooling sytem to my wotwer i pluged in my sdd but it didnt work like if it had died. so i swipet out my macbooks hard drive for the ssd to see if my macbook would reconise the hard drive in the utility but it didnt, and when i put my macbooks hard drive back in. the hard drive dosent get any power. you cant hear it turn on or anything. what i desisded to do is use the enclouser that you use for the optical drive and my mac boots up fine, could my hard drive cable gone bad? if so why does the IR cencor work if they bouth use the same cable and end up in the same conector. i have a macbook pro mid 2009 5,5

2009 MacBook Pros are notorious for having sub-standard SATA cables. I'm 99% certain that's your problem. Even though the IR sensor is on the cable, that doesn't mean that the cable is good - nor does it mean that it's not faulty if it will boot with a hard drive but not with a SSD - SSDs are simply more 'needy' when it comes to a good SATA cable.
Visit www.ifixit.com and find the Apple part number and search for the item on eBay - much cheaper than buying from ifixit; although ifixit will have the instructions for installing the cable.
Good luck,
Clinton

Macbook Problems: Hard Drive Failure or Bad Ram?

I bought a used Black Macbook several months ago. Everything was fine until recently I ran into some problems. It wouldn't boot one day at all, so I wiped the drive clean and reinstalled Snow Leopard. Once again everything was fine for a while until the same thing happened and I once again wiped and reinstalled. The first time it happened I used diskwarrior and disk utility to try and repair the drive with no luck. The weird thing is that after reinstalling I can check the disk and it verifies as ok until one day it fails.
I know that the guy I bought the laptop from upgraded the RAM and the HDD. He didn't do such a good installing the HDD since the IR port and Sleep Indicator Light don't function properly anymore. I've read that happens a lot when installing a new HDD.
So, Here are the symptoms:
Disk Failures
Erratic boot times: Sometimes only 90 seconds, sometimes as long as 13 minutes
Hang ups, beach balls in normal every day tasks
Complete system freezes during normal use
I've never had a kernel panic.
Recently when the system wouldn't boot I ran in verbose mode and it said something about error reading kernel cache Error 0x80000020
Is this definitely my HDD, or could my RAM be causing this?

Thanks for the replies!
Yeah, I think it's the HDD. I was just worried that the RAM was bad and corrupted the HDD or something, but given the symptoms I think you guys are right. Ordered a 7200RPM 320GB HDD off Amazon Prime...will be here tomorrow
I'll post how it goes after I finish installing it. I'm backing up as I type.
I wonder if I can fix the ir port and the sleep indicator light when I install the hard-drive. The sleep indicator light never turns off. It stays on as long as my computer is on, only turns off when I shut it down.

How to tell if second hard drive is going bad

Back in November added second hard drive to my G4 and installed Leopard on it. In last month incredible amount of app crashes, hangs, "force quit," etc. and the occasional kernel panic.
Did an erase and install and now seems like more of the same.
When I run old 10.3 on the original hard drive, life is just fine. To that end, I'm beginning to suspect the hardware. However, when I put the original Apple Hardware Test CD in and tried to use it (never done that before), it said it wouldn't run on this machine.
Is there a Plan B? Is there something wrong with the CD?
Thanks in advance for the help.
j

SMART - look at the bottom of the screen in DU when you click on the drive.
Lepard may be uncovering faulty or marginal memory. Each OS upgrade has put memory to use more so than previously.
Memtest is your best bet there. Or Rember which people like for GUI.
I tended in the past to wipe a drive with zeroes.
If you aren't using Disk Warrior (or TTPro) then you really don't know if your drive has directory or file errors, sadly, 3rd party is pretty much a given and must.
Intech Speedtools is another. Can do a thorough SMART test (45 minutes), test media, scan and reassign bad blocks, and stress a drive.
Disk Warrior manual hardware test will tell you one thing that helps: whether a drive has used spare blocks and how many left, meaning it might be time to zero a drive. Drives tend to fail early if they will, sometimes off the assembly line. Or down the road.
It would be nice if we could run Memtest from Apple Hardware Test. AHT does spot real obvious problems with memory, but sometimes iTunes seems to do a better job.

My Macbook's Hard Drive is going bad, does anyone know a reliable, and cheap replacement.

Hey, the computer still works, but it's in the process of going bad... it's been a little spoty, and I'd like to replace it.
Here are the statistics
Model Name:    MacBook
Model Identifier:    MacBook4,1
Processor Name:    Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:    2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors:    1
Total Number Of Cores:    2
L2 Cache:    3 MB
Memory:    2 GB
Bus Speed:    800 MHz
Boot ROM Version:    MB41.00C1.B00
SMC Version (system):    1.31f1
Serial Number (system):    W88358WA0P2
Hardware UUID:    0A2F7E4B-23E2-5CA3-B336-D1EBE3BE595A
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State:    Enabled
VERSION 10.6.8
BUILD: 10K549
INTEL-ICH8-M AHCI:
Vendor:    Intel
Product:    ICH8-M AHCI
Link Speed:    1.5 Gigabit
Negotiated Link Speed:    1.5 Gigabit
Description:    AHCI Version 1.10 Supported
FUJITSU MHY2250BH:
Capacity:    250.06 GB (250,059,350,016 bytes)
Model:    FUJITSU MHY2250BH
Revision:    0081000D
Serial Number:            K43CT882P00N
Native Command Queuing:    Yes
Queue Depth:    32
Removable Media:    No
Detachable Drive:    No
BSD Name:    disk0
Medium Type:    Rotational
Partition Map Type:    GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status:    Verified
Volumes:
Capacity:    209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
Writable:    Yes
BSD Name:    disk0s1
Macintosh HD:
Capacity:    249.72 GB (249,715,376,128 bytes)
Available:    50.31 GB (50,314,424,320 bytes)
Writable:    Yes
File System:    Journaled HFS+
BSD Name:    disk0s2
Mount Point:    /
Thanks for the suggestions.

For a new hard drive try Newegg.com
Regular SATA drives http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=380&name=Laptop-Hard-Dr ives&Order=PRICE Use the list at the left for larger and faster drives.
SSD drives
http://www.newegg.com/Internal-SSD/SubCategory/ID-636?Order=PRICE Use the list at the left for larger and faster drives.
Or OWC for regular hard drives and SSDs http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/
Here are step by step instructions with pictures on replacing the hard drive in a MacBook with a removable battery. http://creativemac.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=45088
To transfer your current hard drive I like the applications Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. They make a bootable copy of everything on your hard drive. http://www.bombich.com/index.html or http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
You'll need a cheap SATA external hard drive case. Put the new drive in the case then format and partition the new drive and clone your old drive to the new one. Check that it's set up right by booting up from the external drive. Then replace your old hard drive with the new one and put your old one in the external case.
Here's a cheap SATA external hard drive case on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Vantec-NexStar-2-5-Inch-External-Enclosure/dp/B002JQNXZC/r ef=pd_cp_pc_0
If you don’t have the tools to open up the MacBook OWC has a set for $5
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TOOLKITMHD/

Are there any clues that an external hard drive is going bad?

My external hard drive is 2 years old. Are there any clues indicating it is going bad?

Open Disk Utility, select your external disk in the sidebar and verify the drive. If it doesn't show any issuue, the disk works correctly

I have a noisie hard drive is this bad?

My 2010 white MacBook's hard drive is making a rather loud
Spinning sound while using it. Is this ok? Does it mean
It is ready to die?

Most likely. You should probably back up everything you have (there is a fantastic program called SuperDuper! that will make a complete clone of your drive, including settings), then either when the drive dies or when it drives you insane (whichever comes first), buy a new internal drive. If you used SuperDuper!, boot from whatever device you backed up your old drive on, and then clone the external drive onto your new internal drive and everything should work like a charm.
http://download.cnet.com/SuperDuper/3000-2242_4-46651.html

IMac 27" late 2012 3TB hard drive bad blocks

Hi Guys,
I just received the new iMac 27" late 2012 with 3TB hard drive and as soon as I run Drive Genius version 3.2.2 I saw that the drive has 8 bad blocks.
I tried to deleted the logical volume and reinstall the OS X 10.8.2 and after a scan I got the same 8 bad blocks. I give it another try and erase the entire 3 TB volu except the recovery partition and installed Mountain Lion and after running another Drive Genius SCAN for almost 12 hours I got 8 bad blocks again.
Called Apple Support and they are clueless about what is going on as they are not even aware that the late 2012 iMac 27" is not even in stores yet.
I was told that as long as I do not have errors within the OS X I should not worry about as he HDD is fine. I do not believe it since from my experience when you have a bad block you also have a physical damage on you disk surface.
I called Apple Support again and I was told to go to Genius Bar and have them to replace the HDD to a unit not even a week old. I think that I am going to return the unit, maybe I got a lemon and the unit got dropped during the shipping process or who knows.
I hope that this thread will help other owners to have them to run a check disk or scan disk just to make sure that they do not have a bad hard drive on their new iMac late 2012.
Again I have nothing against to anyone as I just hope that someone from Apple will find this thread and try to prevent this from happening to a large scale.
Thank you.

Colos2012 wrote:
... soon as I run Drive Genius version 3.2.2 I saw that the drive has 8 bad blocks.
Drive Genius will report bad blocks when none are present. It may even be responsible for disk corruption.
See: DriveGenius = Problem
Get rid of Drive Genius. Do not install such junk on a Mac.

Do I have a bad hard drive? Constant freezes.

I am having constant freezes on my eMac not specific to any one application. Can't do a force quit when this happens and have to hold down start button to shut down. I thought this might mean that my hard drive was going bad, but when I do a safe boot everything seems to be stabilized and so far this evening no freezes. Have run the disk repair utility several times. Also can't print; computer doesn't find printer but I see it in system profiler. I asked a separate question about the print problem in the printer forum, but I mention this here because I wonder if it might also be related to whatever is causing the system to freeze or is this just a coincidence and an independent problem. What do I do about the freeze problem? Thanks for any advice.

probably not a hard drive problem per se, but you could have a corrupted system, or corrupted parameter RAM (PRAM).
1.) you might try erasing the PRAM (I forget how, but you can look it up easily enough)
2.) You also might try an "archive and install" of the system, which preserves your files, but re-installed the OS. Then you need to do the autoupdates.
Grant

Disk Utility and DiskWarrior can't fix my hard drive. How?

For some strange reason, my startup external Firewire hard drive decided not to work.
Used my Mac internal startup disk and ran Disk Utility and I got this only error message:
*Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit*
Couldn't even mount it. So, I ran DiskWarrior 4.1 and the external FW HD showed up as an *Unknown Disk* and it stated +Directory cannot be rebuilt due to disk hardware failure (-36, 2268).+
Ran TechTool Pro 4.6.1 and the FW HD passed the Read Write test but failed on the Surface Scan with lots of bad blocks.
So, is this a gone case? Any other method or utility to revive the FW HD?

Hard drive failures are not that uncommon because hard drives still have moving parts. Since TechTool's surface scan came back with a lot of bad blocks and DiskWarrior noted that there was a hardware failure, my guess would be that the disc itself may be damaged or scratched.
There are companies that can recover data from damaged discs, but I would not put too much effort into reusing this particular drive.
Keith

Hard drive damaged - replace it myself?

My computer crashed the other day, and a technician came over and after it wouldn't mount on his computer, and made some awful noises trying to start up, he declared the hard disk dead. I live in Costa Rica, so getting service is a pain. The tech offered to sell me a new WD Scorpio 2.5" 320Gb SATA hard drive for $190, and do a "complete installation and configuration" of the drive and system for another $150. I found the DIY guide for replacing the hard drive, and it looks simple enough. My question is, given the damaged drive, is there any risk in replacing the drive myself? Any reason to pay the tech to do it for me?
Thanks

It comes form my experience in the computer repair/computer service industry. There have been many times where I've seen WD OEM (original electronic manufacturer) or Retail drives fail. At my particular store we only carry SeaGate & WD internals hard drives (on occasion we have Maxtor too, but they're a rebranded low quality SeaGate); it seems to be much more frequent that I have my clients coming back in 2-7 months saying "My computer isn't working again" and more often than not testing shows the hard drive to be bad. Most of the time these hard drives are WD. That doesn't mean that SeaGate drives don't fail, but I see it much less often.
Because of things like this WD has made me (& my team) look like we don't know what we're doing. As a result, I encourage SeaGate & Hitachi drives due to their higher quality. Everyone has an opinion though and I'm sure there are good WD drives out there. They just don't seem to be as frequent in my experience. In addition, a lot of manufacturers buy & use WD drives due to their (typically) lower price point. One of my coworkers recently bought a WD external about 4 months ago. It failed on him & while WD gladly replaced the drive, that doesn't help him get his data back. He's a graphic design student & had literally thousands of pictures. WD wanted to charge him $1000+ to send the drive out to a disaster recovery center (which is a common price); but it was still within their 3-year warranty...
I guess my experience has just left a super-bad taste in my mouth with WD. That being said, I still prefer WD over Maxtor drives. I don't what SeaGate says about their quality, they seem to be the cheap-brand cola compared to Coke/Pepsi.
SeaGate or Hitachi > WD > Maxtor
/END RANT; sorry if I hijacked the thread, lol.

Internal Hard Drives for Apple Mac Pro

Hello there,
Does any one have some advice on the following internal HDs. I am in Germany and this is what I have found that I am interested in. I just don't know if they all are for Apple Mac Pro because the provider doesn't specify.
1) HD 1000GB Western Digital RE2 GP, SATA, intern, 3,5'', 7200rpm, 16MB Cache, RoHS compliant, 5 years warranty (not bad eh?) = 139,00 €
2) HD 1000GB Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ SATA intern 7200rpm 32MB Cache 8,9ms: 109,00 €
3) HD Seagate Barracuda ES.2, 1000GB, SAS, intern, 3,5'', 7200rpm, 16MB Cache, 8,5ms, 5 years warranty: 214,00 €
Any bad experience with Wester Digital? Or recommendations for internal hard drives, they are greatly appreciated!
I was wondering too, does it affect the hard drive, that the bigger it is the shorter it will live? I love having 1T, and I already got 2T EXTERNALS from WesternDigital. But I am certainly concerned that the bigger they get, the more chances to fail the might have. Does this make sense?
I am also a little doubtful about internals, they seem to fail faster than the externals, is this true in most cases?
I just want to have the capability of storing my Aperture Library in an internal HD, for easy access and all the images on an external drive.
Thank you for the advice!!
Cheers!
E.

http://www.barefeats.com/hard94.html
I would get WD Black, Hitachi (latest, not their earlier model) or Seagate (no need to spend on ES).
WD has been excellent in Mac Pro, I just would skip on GP.
I only had one drive with 4 bad blocks in 20 WD drives.
Personally, I would get 4 x 640GB WD Caviar drives for internal. They are fast, quiet, and run cool. And sells for US$80.
http://www.wdc.com/th/products/products.asp?driveid=394
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western%20Digital/WD6400AAKS/
http://www.barefeats.com/harper14.html

How does the filesystem handle bad blocks?

Let's suppose your hard drive develops a bad sector on it. What happens?
I remember early products where the OS would constantly try to store new files right on top of the bad block, find the file couldn't be written/verified, then would write it elsehere... then the next time it would do the same thing again, expecting the block to "heal" I guess
What happens on MacOS (extended, journaled) if it's writing a file and finds a bad block in freespace? Does the OS know how to "cocoon off" or tag the bad block as bad and not use it?
Now what happens if the bad block develops underneath an active file? What's the recovery pattern? Or is there none - does it just leave the block bad permanently? Is there any way to fix that?

Boot your computer from the DVD that came with it, and use Disk Utility to check the status of the disk. Select the disk and look at the S.M.A.R.T. status at the bottom. If it displays anything other than Verified, then the disk isn't going to last much longer.
Modern hard disks don't develop "bad sectors" that the OS needs to handle. The disk drive itself automatically remaps bad sectors to spare unused sectors in a way that is transparent to the OS. When too many of those bad sectors are remapped, the S.M.A.R.T. status will report an error.
What you're describing is a failing disk. It's more than likely the early stages of a total failure, rather than just a bunch of bad sectors. Same thing happened to my MacBook a few months ago. After about two hours, it failed completely. I picked up a new drive on the way home, and restored it from Time Machine overnight. The only data that I lost was an iTunes purchase that I made that morning (iTunes Support let me download it again). You have a backup, right?
It's also possible that you've either run out of free space on the startup disk, or you have a process running that's consuming too much CPU and/or RAM resources. If that's the case, a reboot will clear it (until whatever caused it happens again).

2nd Internal Hard Drive Disappearing

I have a Powermac G5 with one 400gb harddrive that came with the computer and a 750gb Western Digital hard drive that I installed about 6 months ago. I never installed an operating system on it the Western Digital drive, it was just for storage of music/photos/video. About a month into owning the harddrive the icon disappeared from my desktop and a warning came up saying "device improperly disconnected." I opened up the computer and made sure the connection was snug, which it was, booted back up and everything worked fine. That has happened 3 times since I've owned the WD drive. Now it has disappeared again, except this time I can't seem to get it back. The connection is very snug. I have unplugged the harddrive and plugged it back in, rebooted a few times and nothing has worked. It would be pretty bad if I lost this drive. Any advice?

Either RMA or put it on a PC and run WD Diagnostics, or do a full low level erase, 7-way write erase the whole thing.
I had one I bought about the same time from OWC and I think I read a bunch of reviews on Newegg about problems with a different batch.
I found a couple areas on the drive that had bad blocks. TechTool Pro media scan can find them but why it doesn't then map them out??? Intech Speedtools is suppose to auto mapout, and maybe it does (all software does is tell the drive to write a pattern 10x and read it back and mark a weak sector as unavailable.... but WDs tool was the only one that really fixed it, not Apple DU 7-way erase, and not even zero all with SoftRAID.
I have about 20 WD drives, this is the only problem I've had, from 10K Raptors to 1TB Black and Green Power and in between.
I'd pick up the 1TB Black, or a couple 640GB Caviar ($69 each! OWC). Or spurge $300 on 10K 300GB boot drive AND 1TB data drive.

W520, hard drive, lots of bad blocks

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for