Bootcamp & Hard Drive Failure

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Hi everybody,

I joined this forum because I had a question about dual booting with MAC OS and windows and I was just wondering if anyone else has had this problem. I just bought a 15" macbook pro and I used bootcamp to dual boot it with Windows XP. Everything was installed and running fine for the past few weeks. It was working when I turned it off. But when I went to use it again yesterday, Mac OS wasn't booting and windows was booting to a blue screen (typical windows). When I rebooted with the OS X DVD and I opened startup disc, the Mac partition wasn't being recognized as a bootable volume. When I tried to reinstall Mac OS it got to the 10% progress and it just hung there and didn't do anything else (No HD or DVD activity).

So I opened disc utility and it said the volume needed to be repaired. But unfortunately the repair utility also just sat there and did nothing after only a few minutes. I tried erasing the volume and running repair & verify again. Same result. So I took it back to the Apple store and they determined that my HD had crapped out. Luckily, since the laptop was less than a month old, they exchanged it on the spot.

However, the tech did mention that bootcamp users experienced the highest rate of hardware failure because of the potential for windows to cause disc corruption problems like this. Has anyone else noticed this? Now I'm a bit skiddish about installing windows on the replacement Macbook. But that's the whole reason I bought it, so I could have a single machine that would run all my Mac and windows programs and not have to 2 computers cluttering my desk. Has anyone else here experienced hardware failure after dual booting or did I just get a bad drive?
 

bobtomay

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15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
The tech that told you that is, quite frankly, uhm, how do I put this nicely?... ignorant.

Running Windows is not, I repeat, not going to cause hard drive failure.

I believe that's gotta be one of the most idiotic things I've heard.


My guess is that the vast majority of the long time members here are dual and even triple booting their machines. If there was some inherent flaw in an OS, any OS, causing hardware failure, it would be all over the media.
 
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The tech that told you that is, quite frankly, uhm, how do I put this nicely?... ignorant.

Running Windows is not, I repeat, not going to cause hard drive failure.

I believe that's gotta be one of the most idiotic things I've heard.


My guess is that the vast majority of the long time members here are dual and even triple booting their machines. If there was some inherent flaw in an OS, any OS, causing hardware failure, it would be all over the media.

Yeah I figured that much. I'm just surprised that a new machine would fail like that after less than a month of use. I'll give it another go ahead and see what happens.
 

bobtomay

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15" MBP '06 2.33 C2D 4GB 10.7; 13" MBA '14 1.8 i7 8GB 10.11; 21" iMac '13 2.9 i5 8GB 10.11; 6S
Pretty much all of us that have been using computers for a long time have had new drives fail early. My most recent, had 1 of 2 WD green drives that went in my server. Less than a month old and kaput. But, WD had a new one in my mail box in 2 days.
 

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