How to do surface scan of hard drive for Macbook?

Question

How to do surface scan of hard drive for Macbook?

I suspect the disk is failing so I did the Disk Utility Verify and Repair which repaired the disk, however I want to also do a thorough surface check of my Macbook Pro's hard drive to make sure the drive is not slowly failing on me.

I downloaded Samsung's bootable hard drive diagnostic CD and booted up with it however at the menu in their tools where I need to press Y or N to continue, the software does not recognize any input from the Macbook keyboard. I tried hooking up a USB keyboard and it didn't recognize any keypresses from that either.

BTW, the drive is Samsung 500GB disk. I did a DIY upgrade of my MBP's disk to upgrade to this disk a few years ago, so I'm not using the original drive from Apple.

Macbook Pro-OTHER, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Jul 27, 2011 2:41 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Jul 27, 2011 2:44 PM in response to Steve Jobs's Black Sweater

Do this but first backup your data:

Drive Preparation

1. Boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu.

2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.

3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.

4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.

5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.

6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

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Answer 2

tjk

Level 9

51,116 points

Jul 27, 2011 2:46 PM in response to Steve Jobs's Black Sweater

Hi S,

Between DiskWarrior, DriveGenius, and TechToolPro, at least one of them used to do that. I don't know if they still do.

Please not that any of them will cost more than buying a new HD, and if your current one is three years old or more, it's reached the "average" life for a HD . . . unless you need to access data from this HD that you do not have backed, I'd just buy a new HD. ymmv

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Answer 3

ds store

Level 7

30,705 points

Jul 27, 2011 2:58 PM in response to Steve Jobs's Black Sweater

To do the entire drive requires backing up of all data,

then holding c and booting off a OS X installer disk and using Disk Utility to Erase with Security Option Zero the entire drive (format HFS+ Journaled)

then naturally reinstalling the OS, programs and files,

or a TimeMachine restore, or a restore from a hold option bootable clone (Carbon Copy Cloner)

You can do a surface scan of the free space on the drive by just launching Disk Utility and selecting Erase Free Space > Zero all data.

I always Zero all new drives, even on new Mac's for the fact that it's not done at the factory and essential system level files get damaged from bits failing on the drive.

I've only had one hard drive related problem in 20 years and that one just plained stopped working. 🙂

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Answer 4

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

Jul 27, 2011 3:07 PM in response to Steve Jobs's Black Sweater

Why do you suspect the drive is failing?

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Answer 5

Jul 28, 2011 11:32 AM in response to Steve Jobs's Black Sweater

Yikes, seems like most of the replies indicated I need to do a full format of the drive in order to do a thorough surface scan? In order to do that, I'd need to backup my system, but that's the problem you see.

I initially found out my disk could be having problems when I attempted to do SuperDuper full backup. It kept failing with an I/O error around the same spot (Itunes related files). I rebooted with OSX install disk, did a Disk Repair which found errors and fixed them. When I tried to do a SuperDuper backup again, I get another I/O error. I've also tried deleting the file SuperDuper is erroring on and then doing a backup again, but it'll just fail on a new file. Another weird thing that happened yesterday is my screen became totally pixelated and the system was unresponsive, I had to hard reboot it, nothing like that ever happened to me before.

Does these symptoms strongly suggest my drive is failing? I'm considering physically removing the drive from the laptop to do a drive scan on it with with a PC and Samsung's bootable diagnostic CD .

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Answer 6

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

Jul 28, 2011 12:01 PM in response to Steve Jobs's Black Sweater

Does these symptoms strongly suggest my drive is failing?

Yes. Any drive that throws I/O errors or develops directory damage should be replaced. But there's a slight chance that your Mac itself could have a hardware fault that's causing the drive to fail, so it would be a good idea to run the SMART "long offline test" through the drive's firmware, which corresponds to what you're calling a "surface scan." Unfortunately there's no complete built-in interface to that self-test mechanism -- the SMART status displayed in Disk Utility is only a small part of it. You can use command-line tools to get to it, but the easiest way is to use the demo of a rather overpriced application called "SMART Utility."

Volitans Software- Makers of SMART Utility for the Mac

It's an exception to the general rule that third-party disk utilities for the Mac are useless.

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Answer 7

Jul 28, 2011 3:53 PM in response to Linc Davis

I held down 'd' during bootup with the osx install dvd and ran the extended test. The system passed. BTW I thought just the memory was thoroughly scanned, I don't think the drive was as those kind of surface scan drive test can take hours.

I downloaded and ran the "Smart Utility" from Volitans. It's reporting 3 bad sectors. Does this mean I should definitely RMA the drive?

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Answer 8

eww

Level 9

53,028 points

Jul 28, 2011 3:57 PM in response to Steve Jobs's Black Sweater

Yes, it does.

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Answer 9

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,535 points

Jul 28, 2011 4:02 PM in response to Steve Jobs's Black Sweater

Does this mean I should definitely RMA the drive?

The answer is at the bottom of that screenshot.

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Answer 10

Jul 28, 2011 4:28 PM in response to Steve Jobs's Black Sweater

Ugh, unfortunately I don't have a SuperDuper backup now since it erases the previous backup when you create a new backup. Since I only found out my drive if failing during the backup and it never completed, I don't have a SuperDuper backup I can boot from and run my laptop off of while my hard drive is being RMAed. 😟 Lesson here? Rotate 2 drives for SuperDuper backups.

At least I have my TimeMachine backup drive so I can restore from something once I do get a replacement drive, but the TM backup is not bootable so my Macbook is out of commission until I get a new drive.

Thanks for everyone's input!

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