Damaged hard drive won't boot

Hi all,

I purchased a new 750GB hard drive from the Apple store and fitted it myself. I then used Time Machine to restore data from my previous hard drive. This worked fine, but I then wasn't able to back up, it would always get stuck after some time and throw up and error message. I ignored this for a few weeks and backed up only important files using Dropbox.

However, I then started troubleshooting the issue more thoroughly and tried to use Carbon Clone Copy to create a clone of my hard drive. This, too, threw up an error message and seemed to point towards a specific file. It would then continue, but make little to no progress.

One time when I was trying to clone my drive, it completely froze up my computer. To get away from this, I held the power button to power down my computer. After this, the hard drive wouldn't mount. When I inserted and booted from my OS X DVD, Disk Utility was unable to repair the disk due to a "B-Node Tree" error. I figured that the TOC was damaged in turning the unit off during data transfer.

After visiting the Apple store, they suggested that I use Diskwarrior. I installed OS X on an external drive and ran DW 4.4 on 'Macintosh HD'. This brings me to where I am now. It has been running for over 2 days and reports "Speed reduced by disk malfunction: 3,287". I can, however, still move the mouse and the number still ticks up gradually.

Does anyone have any answers to the following?
- How long shall I allow Diskwarrior to keep trying to rebuild the disk? I know that this varies with computer, but if anyone has experience with a similar drive I would be interested to know.
- Do the signs point to permanent damage on the drive? Should I be looking to replace it? Was I sold a faulty drive from Apple?
- Do you believe that Diskwarrior will be able to recover the disk?

I would be massively grateful for any thoughts and opinions as this is holding up my work at the moment.

Cheers!

If you have an original Time Machine backup and won't incur any data loss, I would remove the drive, wipe it, and ask for a RMA or return to where you purchased it from. With a drive that size, DW may run for days rebuilding it, and it may still have problems after that.

Thanks for getting back to me.

Problem is, I suspected that the issue was with my time machine drive when I was receiving the original issues so I wiped it to try to do the clone.

Worst case scenario, I have the drive that was in my machine before I changed to the new one. It's a few weeks old so I would lose some data which would be inconvenient but I will have learned a lesson to check drives more thoroughly before using them in the future.

Cheers.