The Death of a Hard Drive

Every had that moment you walk into the office and see a white/gray screen with a folder and a question mark on your iMac? Or better, how about a blank white/gray screen? Oh, yes. Your hard drive isn't feeling too good.

At this point you grab your laptop (that is working) and you start doing searches to try and see how to rescue your computer. In my case, I had a pretty good hunch it wasn't the processor chip.

1. the screen came on

If the screen doesn't light up, especially if the BIOS screen doesn't come up (for Windows), you might be looking at a bad CPU. Sure, there are several possibilities at this point, but the next logical step I would take is to check the health of the hard drive.

Check the health of the disk

1. get an installation disk or thumb drive that you can boot off of; if using the installation disk, insert the disk while the computer is on
2. turn off the computer by holding the power button until it powers off
3. turn on the computer, wait for the initial chime and hold the Option key down until you are prompted to select which device to boot from (there are other key combinations as well); boot from the installation disk or appropriate usb device

Once you are booted external to the potentially fouled up hard drive, you want to use Disk Utility to check on the internal hard drive's health. With the installation disk, you may feel startled by the new installation screens. Don't worry, there are instructions on the second screen you can follow to load Disk Utility and not install the OS.
Once Disk Utility has loaded, if you can see that the internal hard drive did indeed mount (and is not grayed out), you can run verify to see if there are problems with the hard drive.
If there are, and they are not simply permission issues, you have some choices to make.

OK, it's broken; what do I do now?

1. Use the Repair option in the Disk Utility tool (I do not recommend this; I'll explain why later)
2. plug in an external USB drive, close Disk Utility and open Terminal, using command line calls to copy data from the damaged hard drive to the external USB drive
3. use a data recovery tool (like Data Rescue) to first clone the dying hard drive and then pull data from the clone

I would strongly recommend option 3 as you really don't know how much longer the hard drive will last.

My observations (for what they are worth)

Here are some things I have discovered with my last two data recovery sessions (hard drives on a 10 year old MacBook and iMac recently died).

• the hard drive will need to be replaced; sure, you might be able to put a band-aid on the hard drive in question, but it is compromised and you will be left rescuing data from a dying hard drive again and soon.
• repairing the drive involves changes to the hard drive that may end up leaving the stability of the system worse than it was before; if your computer is responding abnormally slow, this is another indication that your hard drive may be failing
• performing a clean or defrag (even on a Windows VM hosted on a Mac) could have the same results as using Disk Utility's Repair
• even with the data recovery tool, each time the disk was scanned, there were more reports of slow reads. This is why I strongly suggest doing a clone before doing anything else if you even suspect the drive might be dying. Then you use the data recovery to pull files from the cloned drive.

In my particular case, the installation disk method worked until I attempted to repair the disk. The results of doing so claimed that all was well, but when I defragged my Windows VM and rebooted the computer, I got the white screen again. Loading Disk Utility via the installation disk, this time the internal hard drive would not mount. And 5 more attempts did not bring forth any fruit.
At this point, I decided to take the hard drive out and use a USB hard drive connection tool meant for data rescue efforts. There seem to be plenty of YouTube videos that provide instruction on how to open up an iMac to remove the hard drive, so I checked them out. I ended up using a toilet plunger (it was clean) to suck the screen cover off since I didn't have the fancy tool. If you are opening up your iMac, you will also need the correct size star driver (the small, precision kind).
Once the hard drive is out, you will need a USB SATA/IDE converter. Most of these converters will have a power source as well, which you will need. I plugged my hard drive into the USB converter, plugged in the USB cable and fired up my data recovery software (e.g., Data Rescue seems to be a popular one), and performed a quick scan. It didn't take me long to realize I needed to do a clone first (which requires a dedicated external drive) as the reported list of slow reads got longer and longer. After performing a clone of the dying hard drive (which took 5 hours during the night and 365 slow read detections), I was finally able to rescue my data.

Prevention is the best medicine

Of course, the best course of action is to be backing up your important data on a frequent basis and there are many tools that can help. Hard drives will eventually fail -- it's just a fact. Rather than wait until a drive is failing, consider

• using a tool like Carbon Copy Cloner and an external hard drive for each computer hard drive
• use a wireless device (like Time Capsule) that all your computers can connect to and perform regular backups
• use an online service like BackBlaze and your WiFi to backup your computer drives

I'm seriously considering using the online service option.
One popular option is BackBlaze which costs about $40 per computer a year. When you factor in the cost of additional external hard drives, the purchase of data rescue software and the long hours, agonizing over a dying hard drive, it might very well be worth it.