Bad hard drive or something else? (Mac Book Pro)

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I have an older ~2011 Mac Book Pro, that was not used after 2012 due to what I believe was my ex putting a virus on the laptop. It basically crashed to black screen out of nowhere while reading and e-mail, and I did not want to reinstall it before taking the information off it. Eventually I remembered about it this year, and decided to go ahead and start it from scratch. I reformatted it and wrote zeros over the hard drive using Disk Utility to try and ensure that any bad components would be erased or written over once the new OS was installed.



At the time of purchase I upgraded it completely, literally chose every option that the Apple Store provided, so it's still a very decent laptop. However, I continue to encounter problems every time I try to upgrade the OS. If I leave it in Snow Leopard or Mavericks it continues to function at optimal conditions. It would crash every time I installed Yosemite, and eventually I figured out this was a common issue if not done through an external disk. When the new El Capitan came out, I went ahead and took a leap and decided to try it. IT WORKED (for a month)!!! Sorta.... When the El Capitan became available in the App store my laptop starting lagging. I believed this was due to needing to update from Mavericks to El Capitan which was the main reason I installed it. The lag did go away, but eventually I decided to power-off my laptop, I usually just have it plugged in as I am a student. The next morning I could not go past the gray screen with the loading bar once I put in my password. I am still not sure what caused this, whether it was the El Capitan OS or the me encrypting the hard drive (literally a month after El Capitan and the day of crash) after installation as I wanted extra protection. Disk Utility could not repair it because it could not verify disk permissions, and after trying a few different Terminal solutions, I went ahead and bought Disk Warrior.



When I start through Disk Warrior, it tells me that the hard drive is in very good condition 9/10 and to go ahead and repair it, but once it reaches the 5th step I get an error that the process will be delayed due to a hardware malfunction (#3). It goes to step 6 in about 5 minutes so it is not a long wait. Once the Warrior rebuilds a new version I am unable to copy it or replace mine, due to the hardware malfunctioning due to BAD BLOCKS!



I don't know whether there are bad blocks or not, when I ran a terminal command to locate them, they all checked out fine.



Is this truly a bad hard drive that needs replacing, or is updating the OS causing issues that not even Disk Warrior can fix? What can I do??
 

Cory Cooper

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Hello and welcome.

From your full description of issues, it sounds as if the hard drive is failing and does have bad blocks. There isn't a standard terminal command to locate bad blocks. fsck only scans the directory of the drive, not the entire surface. You would need a third-party app like Drive Genius or Techtool Pro to performance a full surface scan.

C
 

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