Uninstalling VMware
15/10/12 Filed in: virtualization
I think my drive is dying. What are the symptoms?
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As I say several times every day, every hard drive dies so always backup. If you think you’re hard drive is dying, most of the time, you are right. A drive can show several symptoms that it’s on its way out. Those include:
Slow performance within applications
Computer is slow to open applications
When opening a folder in Finder, you see the spinning color wheel
Clicking sounds
Computer takes an extremely long time to boot up
First, stop everything and backup using Time Machine. If you suspect your drive is dying, you can first boot from the recovery partition in 10.7 and higher by holding down the option key at startup. Once booted, you can run “Disk Utility” to repair the drive. My general rule of thumb here is that green is good, red is bad. At the end of the report you’ll either be presented with a green message or a red message. If the message is red, I say don’t waist your time any further. Stop there and replace the drive. Now in all fairness, it is possible that the problem was only software related and repairing the drive, despite the red message, will actually do some good and you may be out of the water. However, in my experience, this occurs so infrequently that it’s better to rest on the side of caution and just replace the drive.
The only problem with the above scenario of booting from the recovery partition is that you are actually still booting from the possibly bad drive. So in the long run, it’s much better to boot from a separate drive like an external drive or USB key that has a clean install of OS X on it. Normal users will not have this however. So Apple’s first choice of booting from the recovery partition is what most will do instead. It’s just not as reliable.
If you have any sign of your drive dying, you are better off than most. Many drives just decide to stop over night. So if you are backed up, you have nothing to worry about. It’s still a little early to tell whether solid state drives will prove more reliable over time. We will see within the next few years if the days of spinning drive failures are behind us or if we encounter a whole new set of problems associated with SSD drives as they become less expensive and more common in the market.
___________
As I say several times every day, every hard drive dies so always backup. If you think you’re hard drive is dying, most of the time, you are right. A drive can show several symptoms that it’s on its way out. Those include:
Slow performance within applications
Computer is slow to open applications
When opening a folder in Finder, you see the spinning color wheel
Clicking sounds
Computer takes an extremely long time to boot up
First, stop everything and backup using Time Machine. If you suspect your drive is dying, you can first boot from the recovery partition in 10.7 and higher by holding down the option key at startup. Once booted, you can run “Disk Utility” to repair the drive. My general rule of thumb here is that green is good, red is bad. At the end of the report you’ll either be presented with a green message or a red message. If the message is red, I say don’t waist your time any further. Stop there and replace the drive. Now in all fairness, it is possible that the problem was only software related and repairing the drive, despite the red message, will actually do some good and you may be out of the water. However, in my experience, this occurs so infrequently that it’s better to rest on the side of caution and just replace the drive.
The only problem with the above scenario of booting from the recovery partition is that you are actually still booting from the possibly bad drive. So in the long run, it’s much better to boot from a separate drive like an external drive or USB key that has a clean install of OS X on it. Normal users will not have this however. So Apple’s first choice of booting from the recovery partition is what most will do instead. It’s just not as reliable.
If you have any sign of your drive dying, you are better off than most. Many drives just decide to stop over night. So if you are backed up, you have nothing to worry about. It’s still a little early to tell whether solid state drives will prove more reliable over time. We will see within the next few years if the days of spinning drive failures are behind us or if we encounter a whole new set of problems associated with SSD drives as they become less expensive and more common in the market.
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