How to Spot a Failing Hard Drive

Hard drives fail. It's a law of nature. I recently was unfortunate enough to suffer from a failing hard drive. There are many ways to spot this, and I would like to inform you, so that you may spot it before i did.

The Symptoms:

The first thing that I noticed was that my computer took over 15 minutes to boot up. This was not normally the case, and it was the first time alarm bells rung in my head.

The next thing that I noticed was that my airport stopped working. It would disconnect from my Wi-Fi network randomly. It happened many times, and I didn't know why. It was then unable to connect to the network again until I restarted the computer (this was an even bigger pain as it took so long do that too).

The next thing, which was a clear sign that I should take my laptop into an Apple store was that I saw beach balls, and A LOT. During the most common things like using the calculator to opening the Mac App Store ended up in beach balls, and the only way to get my computer back to normal was to perform a hard reset.

Another thing that happened to my laptop at the same time, which I noticed was that my CD drive stopped working. When I inserted a CD it took about 10 minutes to notice that I had inserted one, and then it just said that it was blank, and couldn't recognize if there was anything on it (I did verify this with many CDs). Although the genius at Apple store said that this didn't have anything to with the failing hard drive, it might be something that happens at the same time for you too.

The Apple Store:

I took my laptop to the Apple store, and apart form the normal hospitality; they really helped me along very well. They started up my laptop, ran some diagnostics on it, and came to the conclusion that both the hard drive and the CD drive were failing, and that I had found it just in time. They then went on to say that I would need to replace both my hard drive and my CD drive. This wasn't a problem apart from the fact that I didn't have a back up of my hard drive, and they weren't going to replace the data on the new drive for me.

I hope this helped you spot a failing hard drive.

I am now waiting to receive my laptop with the new drives and my old hard drive, so I can find out a way to transfer to data from the old one onto the new one. If anyone knows any ways of doing this, please comment!!

You can follow my progress on twitter.

To be continued...