albook hard drive starting to worry me
not a good week for my macs, is it? this has been bothering me for days. the hard drive in my albook (15" 1ghz) has been getting increasingly louder to the point that i can hear it making the clicks and buzzes of normal operation (or so i think it is) all the time. just now i heard a loud whine from it that i've never heard before. is now the time to back up to a new drive and swap them out?
alright well i'll look into getting one really soon then. my ibook has been stripped of its casing, so it'll be really easy to just pop the new drive in there, put it into firewire mode, and back up everything.
I would recommend backing up/replacing, as well. Did you know about the S.M.A.R.T. status, though? If you open up Disk Utility and select the hard drive, there should be a label at the bottom "S.M.A.R.T. Status:", then some sort of indicator telling you what shape your drive is in. Mine is "Verified". I haven't gotten use out of this, yet, but I'm hoping it will tell me my drive is going bad before it starts making noises/etc.
getting around to this now since i finally figured i might be able to put a new drive in my ibook (its case has since been stripped off), and then back up using firewire disk mode. but i want to back up EVERYTHING, so what program should i use for that?
You don't need a program, just show all the invisible files in the root directory, then drag and drop them all to a folder.
Whenever i've reinstalled i just put the HD in an external fw or usb case or mac. Install the os onto the new hd in the machine it needs to be in, and transfer all my data with the migration assistant by plugging in the old hd's case and selecting "copy from another partition(or drive?) open this mac. Be aware though USB is dead slow for doing this.
but i want to back up EVERYTHING, so what program should i use for that?
Carbon Copy Cloner.
And newer versions of CCC will let you create an image to back up to so you don't have to blow away the whole drive/partition to make the backup so long as you have enough free space to contain a proper sized image.
alright. now to get a new hard drive! 80gig 5400 rpm sounds like a good start.
Yes! Backup NOW!! i wouldn't risk the change of it going south. Besides, now is the time to upgrade. It's really cheap to get new drives. Like about half a year ago I got a 120GB for only $90. Not bad, considering that it runs like a champ (5.4k RPM) and is amazingly fast. I dropped it into my iBook and it REALLY sped things up. You will be amazed. Anyways, it would not only give you peace of mind, but would also give you a better speed boost.
Don't take the chance
See my PB540c 33Mhz serve a website! http://yui-ikari.coius.info/