About 1.5 months ago, I had a boot failure on my PowerBook. I’ve tried recovering the hard drive with DiskWarrior several times. In fact, my most recent attempt has lasted over six weeks, which is probably a record for perseverance. But today I’m throwing in the towel. I’m going to the local Apple Store to pick up a replacement HD and start from scratch. 😥
Here’s what I should have done:
- Run DW‘s S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics, instead of relying on Apple’s diagnostics.
- If the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics indicate imminent disk failure, abandon DW and try using DataRescue instead.
- Finally, most obvious yet oft-forgotten — backups!
My only complaint about DiskWarrior is that I think it should automatically run the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics and recommend against continuing with DW if the diagnostics indicate disk failure.
Hey, I’m in the same boat. I also had a massive boot failure of my 2007 MacBook. Installed DiskWarrior, ran it overnight and was very happy to see all my data (photos, music) found the next day. I plugged in my external drive to capture my data but the drive wasn’t recognized. I ran to the store and bought another external drive but that one has to be formatted before it will run on a Mac. I inadvertently closed my laptop which powered the thing off. When I repowered, I had to run DiskWarrior all over again. Now, it’s been about 4 weeks and DiskWarrior is still running. It has encountered 11974 disk malfunctions. Thankfully I have another computer (PC) at home and am content to let DiskWarrior run indefinitely but I’m wondering if it’s damaging my screen. Plus I’ve read that it’s probably just reading the same bad block of data over and over again so I think I’m just wasting my time. I’m going to try Data Rescue now.
I have a powerbook g4 with osx 10.3. Using Disk Warrior 4.1.1.
It has been working on Step 5 for over 96 hours and it reports “speed reduced by disk malfunction: 14,479.” The computer is not frozen since the the cursor can be moved and since the disk malfunctions keeps increasing.
I have read online that Step 6 is the longest and i will probably move to Data Rescue II tomorrow morning, unless somebody recommends otherwise.