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