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Possible Failing Hard Drive...advice for moving forward

I've been having lengthy delays caused by spinning beach ball of death and decided to get serious about my back-ups while I figured out what was wrong. In addition to Time Machine, have purchased a drive just to have a clone copy of hard drive and a bootable startup drive. While using Carbon Copy Cloner to do this, it reported bad sectors on my drive. Suggested deleting those files which I proceeded to do (deleting those took forever as it initiated the sbbod for each one). But the SBBOD keeps occuring.


I need help and advice to think this through...(actual questions in bold)

5 bad sectors aren't a lot but even 1 that causes the wretched SBBOD is too much. Is there a way to avoid that sector or is it just a precurser of future bad things to come? (let me say here that my drive is not a Seagate).

Do those bad sectors corrupt my clone?


I don't want to weigh this discussion down with too many questions...but these are my thoughts about moving forward


If I decide that, indeed, my hard drive is failing I see the following options:

  • Replace hard drive (have received local quote of $100 for labor + cost of drive approx $100) - this is certainly the cheapest, easiest and most logical solution.
  • Take this opportunity to replace the laptop I gave to my daughter when hers was stolen. I would only do this if I could use the iMac's screen as a 2nd monitor. However, the early 2009 iMacs don't support being used as 2nd monitor. I would have to use ScreenRecycler & a VNC. How do those affect performance? If there is no adverse affect, I like this solution.


Any and all advice appreciated. iMac specs in signature.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5), Early 2009 with 8GB RAM

Posted on Dec 5, 2012 9:57 AM

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Posted on Dec 5, 2012 1:22 PM

The drive is almost certainly bad and you should replace it immediately. Rule out other hardware failures such as a damaged SATA cable or a bad logic board. VNC will be noticeably laggy but usable for everything except animation.

2 replies

Dec 5, 2012 7:22 PM in response to Linc Davis

Thanks for your reply Linc

Linc Davis wrote:


Rule out other hardware failures such as a damaged SATA cable or a bad logic board.

Do you mean in addition to the hard drive, as that failure seems pretty evident at this point? I guess the cable would be a visual inspection. How would I know about the logic board?


I'm pretty well convinced to replace the Hard Drive. Now the fun question is do I want to go with an SSD drive? I'm reading up now - obviously we're talking expensive for the size I would need. Not sure about these hybrid drives? Small amount of SSD combined with large amount of hard disk? Also reading about using the optical drive slot with something like OWC's Data Doubler. So many options. Any thoughts are welcome

Possible Failing Hard Drive...advice for moving forward

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