 bjf123We Want... A ShrubberyPremium
join:2000-02-11
Hamilton, OH | Bad Disk Sectors I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable external drive and to backup the hard drive in my iMac. I'm starting to get an occasional error about a file being on a bad sector of the hard drive. Short of replacing the hard drive, is there any thing I should try? The iMac is out of warranty and Apple Care.
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 acadielPress fire to beginPremium
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kudos:1 | I depends on if the drive is truly headed south or if there are just a few unrecoverable sectors.
Try this utility and see how bad the damage is: »www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php
In some cases, if the bad sector number is small, a reformat will make the drive firmware mark those as bad and use some of the drive spare sectors (every drive has then) to replace the bad sectors. If the drive is indeed on its way south, then there is nothing really to do other than replacement.
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bjf123We Want... A ShrubberyPremium
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Hamilton, OH | I guess the drive is headed south. |
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kudos:1 | Just for kicks and grins, if your have your stuff backed up and on another drive, try reformatting it, and run SMART utility again. I'm curious if it remaps the bad sectors or not.
I have a 500GB WD Blue in the basement desktop PC that had a few bad sectors a few years ago; I reformatted it, it didn't show the bad sectors any longer in SMART, and crossing fingers, hasn't developed any new ones. So, YMMV. It really depends if the 8 sectors are a fluke and can be remapped, or if the drive is really going to be dying. You can't really tell until you reformat it and monitor it.
Edit: Maybe what this guy suggests in here would work with the Ubuntu "badblocks" utility. »superuser.com/questions/148227/f···ard-disk
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bjf123We Want... A ShrubberyPremium
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Hamilton, OH | I have two cloned drives. One is always attached and is updated every other day. The other is attached, cloned, and then stored elsewhere. I'll clone the unattached drive tonight to update it. How would I proceed after that? Boot to one of those drives and using Disk Utility format the iMac's internal drive, and then use CCC to clone one of the external drives back?
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kudos:1 | said by bjf123:I have two cloned drives. One is always attached and is updated every other day. The other is attached, cloned, and then stored elsewhere. I'll clone the unattached drive tonight to update it. How would I proceed after that? Boot to one of those drives and using Disk Utility format the iMac's internal drive, and then use CCC to clone one of the external drives back?
Make sure your clone is working OK first. Update it, go into Startup Disk in System Preferences, select it, and boot from it (it'd help if it were named something different than your internal HDD to make sure you were booting from the correct one). If you have FileVault or anything like that installed, do not proceed, and let us know. (Let's assume that you don't have FV turned on.) (Edit: If FV is turned on, then stop and us know. You might wind up not cloning your home directory or whole drive correctly, depending if you're using Pre-10.7 FV or 10.7FV).
After booting from your cloned drive (and making sure you have it updated), open Disk Utility and zero out the internal drive (erase - 1 pass). What this does is make sure that every single sector of the internal drive is being written to; if there is a bad sector, the hard drive firmware will attempt to remap it with a "spare". This is what the Ubuntu link I gave you in the previous note tries to do; but it does it non-destructively (it tries to read it and immediately write it right back). After erasing the disk with all zeros; open up SMART Utility again and see if any of your numbers have changed. If they did, and everything appears OK, run CCC again and clone your drive back. If it's successful, simply keep an eye on the internal drive with SMART Utility for any additional errors that crop up. If they do, then likely yes, your drive is on its way out. If no errors show up again for the foreseeable future, you might be OK for now. Just keep your eye on it and make sure you keep your clone updated. |
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bjf123We Want... A ShrubberyPremium
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Hamilton, OH | Thanks. I don't have File Vault turned on. Both of the cloned drives are named for the make and model of the drive, so they're unique. I'll clone the unattached drive overnight tonight and start the formatting and recovery process in the morning.
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bjf123We Want... A ShrubberyPremium
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Hamilton, OH | The format is running with an estimated time remaining of 6 hours. One thing that's strange is the cloned drive that is always attached still showed as running 10.6.8 while the internal drive and the drive I cloned overnight are running 10.7.3. I'll have to figure out why the attached drive didn't update to Lion when I installed it on the iMac.
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 jrs8084Premium
join:2002-03-02
Statesville, NC
kudos:1 | reply to bjf123
OT:
Your drive may be indeed going south, but I do remember using those SMART utilities back when the SMART drives became popular-nearly every perfectly functioning drive was supposedly reporting errors/near imminent death. I finally stopped looking at those utilities and the drives churned on for years without errors.
Disk Utility was happy with the drive, but the 3rd party utilities all reported an apocalypse. |
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kudos:1 | said by jrs8084:OT:
Your drive may be indeed going south, but I do remember using those SMART utilities back when the SMART drives became popular-nearly every perfectly functioning drive was supposedly reporting errors/near imminent death. I finally stopped looking at those utilities and the drives churned on for years without errors.
Disk Utility was happy with the drive, but the 3rd party utilities all reported an apocalypse.
Well, it depends.. in normal operation, if the drive has errors, and a write is attempted to that bad area, it's supposed to get 'swapped' with a spare sector. If the OP zero's out his drive, and get the problematic sectors 'swapped out' with good ones, it'll be easier for him to start from zero and then monitor from there.
A drive can report errors and still be verified in SMART - OS X will not flag a drive with a few errors; however, I'm not sure what its threshold is. |
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bjf123We Want... A ShrubberyPremium
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Hamilton, OH | Well, I think things got worse. Here's the report after the reformat and restore. |
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kudos:1 | Yep, its definitely gone south. Well, at least you tried and had a good clone of your system! |
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bjf123We Want... A ShrubberyPremium
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Hamilton, OH | Yep. Now I just have to figure out if it makes sense to replace the hard drive or just get a new iMac. Both are going to cost more than I have right now.
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kudos:1 | said by bjf123:Yep. Now I just have to figure out if it makes sense to replace the hard drive or just get a new iMac. Both are going to cost more than I have right now.
If you were near me, I'd just say to haul it over, and we'd try Drive Genius or Spinrite on it to see if we could do anything else. However, Ohio is quite a drive.
Good luck! Maybe you can find someone near you who can help you take the iMac apart if you get a new drive. |
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bjf123We Want... A ShrubberyPremium
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Hamilton, OH | I got a new, larger drive installed at the local Apple store. They ran their system diagnostics and confirmed the old drive was on its last legs.
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kudos:1 | Thanks for the update, glad everything worked out! |
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