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MIKEinMICH Author

Level 1

20 points

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)

Posted on Jan 28, 2013 6:27 PM

Best reply

BDAqua

Level 10

239,375 points

Posted on Jan 28, 2013 6:54 PM

Most likely the drive is really failing & will need replacing.

If need be to copy to another Drive, hold Option key while choosig repair Disk in DW to build a new directory without changing the one on the drive, you can even clone using the new directory.

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17 replies

MIKEinMICH Author

Level 1

20 points

Jan 31, 2013 5:01 PM in response to BDAqua

Thanks BD, i've wound up judiciously doing some old fashioned drag n ' drop of Preferences and app reinstalls -- combined with the Import function as you suggested for a few individual apps - i'm pretty content with the restore i've done. No apparent loss of any Media files or docs.

Happily this was a relatively lightly used leisure time vs work computer, so there wasn't a vast amount of critical data involved. Time consuming, but gives me impetus to immediately sneaker-net around to my various work Macs and get them backed up... and again, makes me appreciate DW. I think i'm ready to put this one back in service at "Mom's Place" and expect some calls about the 'idiosyncracies' of OS 10.6.. albeit not terribly different from Tiger....

Thanks as always. Much appreciated.

Mike

BDAqua

Level 10

239,375 points

Feb 1, 2013 1:16 AM in response to MIKEinMICH

Great work, thanks for the report & good luck! 🙂

hard drive repair question