How To Fix A Hard Drive On A Macbook With A Harddrive That Is Failing

Transcription

1 Forced to do a Disaster Recovery This was not a plan so much as an execution forced upon me by the realities of a dying computer. The computer began to lose itself. It would die in the middle of things. Sometimes we could get it to come back on for a few minutes. Initially I grabbed a few important things from the hard drive: my Quicken and TurboTax files. Then I began the process of trying to fix it and then back it up completely. CHKDSK First I tried a fix based upon the information that I read on a blue screen of death: First allocation unit not valid. I searched the internet for that error message and found instructions telling me to run a CHKDSK from the Command prompt. Below are those instructions and then the screen capture of that process. Instructions: Turn on computer access Safe Mode if necessary. (I did access Safe Mode at some point, but when I actually ran the CHKDSK I was in a normal mode. Safe Mode can be initialized by holding down the delete key at a certain point during the startup process watch the screen. Run CHKDSK at command line or SFC/SCANNOW. To do that select START>RUN. Then type cmd + OK Drive letter: + Enter (eg. d: + Enter) cd\ + Enter chkdsk/<switch> + Enter (eg. chkdsk/r or chkdsk/f) (F means find I think and R means Repair.) If asked to schedule the chk on the next startup Choose Y + Enter Exit + Enter After you have done this, do it for all appropriate drives and run again until all errors are fixed. See Screen Captures below. 1

2 Again, the instruction sequence for running chkdsk at the command line: Start>Run: cmd +OK Drive letter+: eg. D: +Enter cd\ +Enter chkdsk/<switch> + Enter (switch in this case could be f or r----i used r which included the repair instead of just the find eg. chkdsk/r) It said: Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Chkdsk may run if this volume is dismounted first. ALL OPENED HANDLES TO THIS VOLUME WOULD THEN BE INVALID. Would you like to force a dismount on this volume? (Y/N) I said: Y +Enter This was when it found the above-pictured error. Instructions told me to run this until there were no more errors. See below. 2

3 Checking the next drive (C) which I had checked previously, it said if I was asked to schedule the scan at next start, I was to say Yes (y), which I did. Data Backup to External Hard Drive After I went through all this, the computer did come on once again. I figured it was time to do a file backup. I borrowed a Maxtor III external hard drive with lots and lots of gigabytes of space. I copied all my data files from the hard drives of my machine to the external drive. 3

4 Device Manager Check Then I checked my hardware device manager to see if there were any signs of problems there. Go to My Computer, right click, select properties, choose hardware/ Device Manager. If any of the devices are registering a problem, an icon should alert you to a problem. No icons alerted me to anything. Virus Check Though this should have been my first line of defense, it wasn t. However I decided it was time to search for viruses with McAfee. Wouldn t you know? It found some things with the name Trojan attached. They were deleted. Still my computer was shutting down. 4

5 Check Connections The next chore is to check all of the connections inside the machine. Unplug everything. Take the cover off the cpu. Do a static discharge. Then check the components to make sure they are tight. I did this. See picture of the inside of my machine. 5

6 Switching Hard Drives and Checking Them Everything was tight, but the problem still existed. As you can see in the picture above, I have 2 hard drives in my machine. It seemed to me that it is probable that one of these are failing, but not both. So I thought it was time to look into that. I also wondered if I should do a clean installation of Windows or Ubuntu. I tried to identify which of the two hard drives were bad by switching them around. I could not really determine anything decisively. I did learn that the top hard drive, or first in the sequence is the master and the second is the slave. In order to switch them around I had to switch slots and switch a little tab on the hard drive unit itself. 6

7 You can see in the picture above the words slave and master. I switched the tabs and the slots. Reinstalling the Operating System When all else fails, reinstall the operating system. This I have done. I tried several approaches to this, including installing Ubuntu. This, however, did not work. I think that Ubuntu didn t like the way the bios were set for the dual hard drives. I m not sure about that. I could get it to run briefly from the CD, but that s all and then it crashed. Finally, after messing some more with the bios, I got Windows XP to install. So far, so good. After hour the system is still running. I m going to bed. Next Day Computer dies again. Take computer to computer store in a box. Ask computer store to fix computer. Later store calls and reports that I have broken one of the computer harnesses while I was fooling around. But the real problem was the video card. They replaced it. Here is the culprit. 7