Macbook Hard Drive Failed!!!!

B

baseballlover1

New member
Ok... so my computer freezes and then wouldn't start correctly. So i take it to the local place to get it fixed. THE HARD DRIVE WAS COMPLETELY FAILED! I didn't have an external hard drive or backups either! I lost EVERYTHING! a **** load of itunes, all my pics with family friends and europe, EVERYTHING! Well i learned my lesson and bought n external hard drive.

:wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall :wall
 
Sorry about that. I am a Mac guy too and even knowing Macs are a well built solid machine they will break once in a while. The same thing happened on my eMac a while back and I learned the hard way to back up important files. With 3 Macs in the house I just make sure they all have the important files as backups on each. An external hard drive is the best though.
 
Sorry to hear that Daniel. I have a MacBook as well, I don't really back anything up as most of my important documents are in emails but I do use the iDisk every so often.



With the price of external hard drives these days, I really need to pick one up. The WD MyBooks are my favorite external drives.
 
Wow, sorry to hear about that. I've had my MBP hard drive go bad too, but I had "somewhat" of a backup, iTunes, photos, but nothing else. Now, I have Leopard and Time Machine, so I feel a little more safe.



You should just upgrade to Leopard and get an external hard drive too. That's pretty much all you need. No need to remember to run a backup.
 
I used a data retrieval company online to get my stuff back off a failed drive. It was $300 but I needed the stuff so...



I back up to 2 externals now. Lesson learned
 
dave40co said:
I am a Mac guy too and even knowing Macs are a well built solid machine they will break once in a while.
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Apple uses the same suppliers as every other computer manufacturer. Apple's are just as likely to experience a hard drive failure as any other computer.



This is a reminder to back everything up. You must have backups of your data at all times. Everyone should have an external hard drive...
 
Actually, my Macbook has a very high operating temperature. Since my HD failed at 1 year and 4 months, and it hardly leaves my desktop, it probably failed because it's in an oven.



Good thing I can't actually do any of my work on my Mac. <_<
 
I have two drives in each of my desktops and one of the features of Norton 360 is a backup so I have it backup my important files from the main drive to the second drive. The only way I would lose my files is for both drives to go bad simultaneously and since it has been years since I have had any type of drive failure I think that is hardly likely.



My laptop is a different story though. For me a second drive just isn't practical for the laptop. The backup feature in Norton 360 lets you chose different media to do the backups to and one of them is an online service that Symantec offers. It comes with 2Gb of space which is more than enough for my laptop but you can purchase more. The nice thing about online backups is the ability to access them from anywhere without having to carry anything extra around. With free wifi being so prevalent these days I am rarely away from access to the internet.



All-in-one Protection - Norton 360
 
I have two drives in each of my desktops and one of the features of Norton 360 is a backup so I have it backup my important files from the main drive to the second drive. The only way I would lose my files is for both drives to go bad simultaneously and since it has been years since I have had any type of drive failure I think that is hardly likely.



My laptop is a different story though. For me a second drive just isn't practical for the laptop. The backup feature in Norton 360 lets you chose different media to do the backups to and one of them is an online service that Symantec offers. It comes with 2Gb of space which is more than enough for my laptop but you can purchase more. The nice thing about online backups is the ability to access them from anywhere without having to carry anything extra around. With free wifi being so prevalent these days I am rarely away from access to the internet.



All-in-one Protection - Norton 360
 
IIRC, Macs are SATA drives. In the OP's case, I would try connecting it to an adapter and then connecting it to a different Mac as a slave to see if you can retrieve some data.
 
chances are your data can still be recovered. Usually the whole hard drive itself doesn't fail all at once. Certain sectors will go bad which will then corrupt the OS and prevent you from booting up. But as Prinz suggested, if you can connect the hard drive to another system you can usually retrieve most of the important files that you need. Some of these places that do hard drive recoveries can even retrieve data from badly damaged hard drives (fires, water damage, etc.)
 
BlackElantraGT said:
chances are your data can still be recovered. Usually the whole hard drive itself doesn't fail all at once. Certain sectors will go bad which will then corrupt the OS and prevent you from booting up. But as Prinz suggested, if you can connect the hard drive to another system you can usually retrieve most of the important files that you need. Some of these places that do hard drive recoveries can even retrieve data from badly damaged hard drives (fires, water damage, etc.)
Click to expand...



:werd: I have to do that with a 300 GB drive that belongs to my wife.
 
PrinzII said:
:werd: I have to do that with a 300 GB drive that belongs to my wife.
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I know the pains of having a hard drive fail. It's the reason why I'll never do a RAID 0 setup again, no matter what the performance increase may be. Somehow I always risk the chance by not backing up, despite knowing that eventually a hard drive will fail or some Windows registries will go bad. I'm an idiot, but part of the reason why I don't seem to learn my lesson is because I tend to use my hard drives to its full capacity early on and it's not cost-effective for me (at that time) to get a big enough hard drive to back up everything I need. With today's hard drive space and online storage options though, I shouldn't have any excuses. I'm just too lazy and procrastinate too much.



Plus, now I have different priorities. Before (in my late teens, early 20's) I was concerned with my vast music collection but now all that's really important to me are family photographs. I can always get back music, but family photos and videos are a different story.
 
I've always backed up every night. I used DejaVu which was totally automatic. Now I've upgraded to Leopard and WOW, they have "Time Machine" which backs up every hour and you can go back for weeks or months to see what your drive had on it at that time. For the last few days I've been working on my website and today I seem to have lost a web page, I must have accidentally deleted it a couple of days ago. I went to Time Machine, went back a couple of days and there the file was! One click and it was right back where it belonged. Truly a wondrous piece of software.
 
BlackElantraGT said:
I know the pains of having a hard drive fail. It's the reason why I'll never do a RAID 0 setup again, no matter what the performance increase may be. Somehow I always risk the chance by not backing up, despite knowing that eventually a hard drive will fail or some Windows registries will go bad. I'm an idiot, but part of the reason why I don't seem to learn my lesson is because I tend to use my hard drives to its full capacity early on and it's not cost-effective for me (at that time) to get a big enough hard drive to back up everything I need. With today's hard drive space and online storage options though, I shouldn't have any excuses. I'm just too lazy and procrastinate too much.



Plus, now I have different priorities. Before (in my late teens, early 20's) I was concerned with my vast music collection but now all that's really important to me are family photographs. I can always get back music, but family photos and videos are a different story.
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I am contemplating backup options as well. I may consider something like a NAS and NovaStor.
 
PrinzII said:
I am contemplating backup options as well. I may consider something like a NAS and NovaStor.
Click to expand...



Not sure if you want a DIY solution or plug n play but there are some awesome Linux NAS distributions that will support just about any protocol imaginable to work with Windows, Linux or Mac machines...



FreeNAS (built on FreeBSD) just released a new version...

FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server - Home



Openfiler is more of a scratch/purpose build distro...

Openfiler — Friendly enterprise storage management platform
 
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