I have an old Macbook, hard drive which died yesterday. It was working fine and I hadn't noticed anything really alarming recently (like slow load times or errors or anything). Then after watching a video and it closed, the screen half-froze (I don't know how else to describe it I could still move the mouse and click on the top bar but it wouldn't actually do anything, rest of the screen gave the rainbow wheel thing). It sat for a while like that so I powered it off by holding the power button.
Upon restart I got the flashing ? folder. Disconnected an external HD I had and tried restarting again, then it sat on the gray screen spinning screen (no folder) for forever, so I turned it off again. I tried various things I found online (entering from safe mode -- didn't work, resetting PRAM -- didn't make a difference) and all of them either gave me a gray screen or the flashing ? folder. It sounded like there were some faint clicks during the restarts. Then I tried booting from an install and opened disk utility, which couldn't find my hard drive. Someone else took it out and put it in an external enclosure (if that's the right term) and he said it just made clicking sounds and wouldn't do anything.
Is this hard drive basically completely, totally, 100% dead? I did have some backups, so while I'm a bit sad because I didn't have everything, it isn't catastrophic or anything. I'm was ready to say good-bye to it if there's no hope for it, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't jumping the gun. Thanks!
Upon restart I got the flashing ? folder. Disconnected an external HD I had and tried restarting again, then it sat on the gray screen spinning screen (no folder) for forever, so I turned it off again. I tried various things I found online (entering from safe mode -- didn't work, resetting PRAM -- didn't make a difference) and all of them either gave me a gray screen or the flashing ? folder. It sounded like there were some faint clicks during the restarts. Then I tried booting from an install and opened disk utility, which couldn't find my hard drive. Someone else took it out and put it in an external enclosure (if that's the right term) and he said it just made clicking sounds and wouldn't do anything.
Is this hard drive basically completely, totally, 100% dead? I did have some backups, so while I'm a bit sad because I didn't have everything, it isn't catastrophic or anything. I'm was ready to say good-bye to it if there's no hope for it, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't jumping the gun. Thanks!