HD Failure?

Good morning all. About an hour ago my late 2006 MacBook pro froze for quite a while so it had to be forced down by holding the power button for 10 seconds. At reboot, it looked like all would be normal but after boot was taking longer than usual, the display suddenly showed what appeared to be a progress bar. After about 15 minutes, the progress bar suddenly appeared aprox 1/4 full and then it just disappeared entirely. After another 10-15 minutes of just the apple and the spinning cog, I shut it down again and attempted to boot from another partition on the same drive. No dice, but to be fair I didn't really give it that much time before I grew impatient and convinced myself I needed to run DiskWarrior immediately. I then booted from an external HD running Tiger and that's what I'm on now. Oddly, the main partition on the internal hard drive is showing as an option to boot @ start up when I hold down the option key, as is the other partition on the drive, however, now that I'm booted from an external, only the smaller of the two partitions shows on the destkop.

Further adding to the mystery, DiskWarrior DOES recognize the main partition even though it does not appear on the desktop. I am currently running DiskWarrior on that drive now and it's taking forever. I have not recently installed any software or hardware updates at all, but I did inherit a battery from a family member who replaced her MBP a few weeks ago. I don't think that should have an effect on my hard drive but I thought I'd mention it.

I'm inclined to believe this is just a bad partition and not a complete hard drive failure since one partition is still showing and all the data on it is accessible. I'm wondering if I should just attempt to wipe it and reinstall, but there is some data on that main partition that I'd like to save. Since it's not showing on the desktop though, I don't know how I'd do that.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks so much to everyone for reading.

bsm

I'm inclined to believe this is just a bad partition and not a complete hard drive failure since one partition is still showing and all the data on it is accessible. I'm wondering if I should just attempt to wipe it and reinstall, but there is some data on that main partition that I'd like to save. Since it's not showing on the desktop though, I don't know how I'd do that.

Click to expand...

To be honest, it's not worth the trouble. As inexpensive as new large fast hard drives are, just replace it. As for retrieving any lost data is concerned, you might want to give Data Rescue 3 a try. A bit pricey at $99 but you can download their trial version first to see if it works for you.

Turns out, the drive is actually fine.

However, I did have to wipe it clean, thus no OS exists right now. My optical drive also appears to be malfunctioning which I'd never have noticed since I never use it. Hence, I cannot install an OS on the clean drive that way.

I thought I'd use the install from a hard drive method, and figured my iPod nano would work, but am worried that restoring a disk image to the nano using the disk utility will strip it of it's ability to be recognized as an ipod when I'm done. I've read it's possible to erase and reformat an ipod, use it for what you need to use it for and then restore it to it's iPod settings using itunes but I'm just not sure, and I don't want to ruin my 6 month old nano.

Any advice on this?

Thanks-

Good morning all.

I need to use my Nano to install OSX on a machine with a malfunctioning superdrive.

IS it possible for me to erase the nano using disk utility and then once I"m done reinstalling the OS, restoring it to do it's normal thing?

I've read it is possible and that the machine should recognize it as an ipod regardless, meaning when I plug it in after the fact, itunes should give me the ability to restore. However, when I click erase in disk utility I get a message saying if I erase it it will lose it's ability to play music.

Does anyone have any insight on this?

Thanks-

If I were you, I would not mess with the Nano. Yes, you could probably use it in disk mode and later on restore it, but there's always the chance that it may get zapped. Just buy a inexpensive 8 GB flash drive and use it instead. I've seen them for as low as $15.00 - $17.00. Check out this web site.

@bsm

Please do not cross post. As you can see both your posts could have easily been combined into one saving us from jumping around trying to answer. Your question regarding the Nano was answered by me earlier.