hard drive repair question
Hi, got a Mac Mini circa 2009 - Intel that I've had running at my Mom's house forever. 60g drive.
It's been flawless for years. Recently she got the spinning gear on startup with no resolution to the OS screen
(10.4x) so i took it home and am running Disk Warrior. DW gets to Step 5 with the 'speed reduced by
disk malfunction' message and is currently wallowing through the process of repairing the directory.
Question - what is the chance that this HD is not permanently damaged abd is there potential that the
hardware issue can be repaired so as not to require trashing the Mini / replacing the HD ?
There's been relatively little action on this thing except email and browser use. I suspect frequent manual
shut-off and restarts of the Mini using the power button along with power outages/spikes -could've
screwed up the HD but i don't know.
I am going to let DW do its thing and will backup the HD contents to an external FW drive but don't
find anything online about potential for repairing the existing HD issue(s) causing this message. DW
is creeping along after about an hour and is up to #183 in its repair "count" or whatever...
Thanks for any insights on what i'm dealing with here,
Mike
Mac mini, Mac OS X (10.5.8)