S.M.A.R.T errors?

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Imagine my surprise when I try to download Yosemite a few months ago out of pure laziness and find I can't because my "Disk has S.M.A.R.T errors". I have never heard of these, I don't know what they do, and I don't know what causes them but lately all these spontaneous and illogical issues with Apple devices have just been stacking up so I'm genuinely unsurprised.

El Capitan just came out so I tried the same thing. My Macbook Pro likes to randomly lag uncontrollably at times and I heard it was much faster (I haven't used Safari in well over a year because I couldn't even get the app to run without freezing and crashing on startup)...and got the same result:
Screen Shot 2015-10-10 at 7.56.59 PM.png


Is there any way for me to get El Capitan downloaded without having to backup everything (which is a notable pain because it takes ages), spend several hundred dollars (again), and wait several weeks for this unexplained anomaly? I've heard you can get this message by mistake and don't have to go through that entire process, but I have no idea how to fix it.

Oh and I tried submitting this to the Apple Support Forums but I think they blocked me over an earlier issue in which some dude named Peter threw a massive tantrum because I wasn't a complete basement-dwelling geek with several college degrees that would've led me to delve far deeper into the problem technologically and solve it myself. Such a wonderful and benevolently helpful community that has also charged me over $2,000 over 3 years for this mediocre product lol
 

Cory Cooper

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Hello and welcome.

Unfortunately, El Capitan isn't the cause of the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) issues you are experiencing with your hard drive. What the system is telling you, is that the hard drive is reporting a pre-failure warning to you. You need to immediately take action and backup any data that you can, because your hard drive will fail at any moment.

This was probably the cause of the random lagging you were experiencing previously. El Capitan is more precise and proactive in detecting and reporting these failure warnings than previous versions of Mac OS X.

I highly recommend that you attempt a backup of some sort if you can, especially if you don't have one currently. You will probably need to replace the hard drive as well.

Sorry for the bad news and your bad experience in the Apple Discussions,

C
 
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Disk Utility checks the drive directory that keeps track of all your system files. SMART status is used for checking the internal hardware stuff and also attempts to warn the user before drive just flat out dies. The hard drive directory still be fine on a cont. failing drive but don’t count on it to stay if you continue to write on the failing hard drive. So, try to make a minimum of 1 copy of your complete data on the failing drive quickly. Two or three copies would be a much better option.

After that, you can use software like Carbon copy cloner (donation ware) or Stellar Drive Clone (available in free and paid versions) software to make a bootable clone of your failing HD to use as one of your copies. In System Preferences > Startup Disk select the clone of your startup drive. After that, you can use the clone for your work.
 
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You can also use the "free" version of SuperDuper! for making a bootable backup/clone. But, make the backup ASAP, so at least you have a backup of your stuff.

If any of the aforementioned backup options are problematic/don't work, I just saw this article on another site about the excellent product Data Rescue:

http://www.macworld.com/article/300...w-harvest-data-from-a-failing-hard-drive.html

Data Rescue has been around for quite some time, and from the previous reviews I have read, does a fantastic in recovery data from a failing drive.
 
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