HDD failure or software corruption?

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HDD failure or software corruption?

I was running windows 7 via bootcamp yesterday and I went to switch back to OSX with all proper shut down procedures and OSX booted up very slowly. It finally loaded, somewhat, lauchpad wouldn't work, and even a simple click on the wifi icon in the menu bar sent it into the spiraling beach ball of death. As an attempt to resolve the issue I restarted multiple times all with the same results and now wont even boot up OSX or windows. OSX begins then comes up with a kernel panic message and windows goes into a disk check stopping 63% through. So as I sit here typing this from the Safari browser in the recovery partition I question what the main problem is. It seems like a harddrive failure but it still partially works. Also an suggestions on how to fix this without loosing any of my data if at all possible. Any help whatsoever is invited!

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), Early 2011, 8gb ram, 750gb HDD

Posted on Dec 10, 2012 1:07 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Dec 10, 2012 1:11 PM in response to tolsen5468

Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions - Lion/Mountain Lion

Boot to the Recovery HD:

Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.

Repair

When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported then click on the Repair Permissions button. When the process is completed, then quit DU and return to the main menu. Select Restart from the Apple menu.

If this doesn't help then you may want to try the AHT: OS X Mountain Lion- Use Apple Hardware Test. Also see Intel-based Macs- Using Apple Hardware Test.

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Answer 2

tolsen5468 Author

Level 1

0 points

Dec 10, 2012 1:30 PM in response to Kappy

I did that and the S.M.A.R.T. status is verified but when testing the Mac HD partition the verification says to do a repair and the repair comes up with the save all files you can and format the drive and do a fresh reinstall of OSX. The only reason I post a question about this is because if the windows partition was fully functional I would simply do what it says but the windows side is also not functional so it makes me wonder.

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