Hard Drive Dead?

[Nukeban]

Hi folks, thanks in advance for your advice.

My Mac crashed while booted from an external drive connected via Firewire. Not sure what caused the crash. At the moment of crash I was dragging a text file on to a Chrome window.

The external drive is divided in to two partitions, which I'll call Good Partition and Bad Partition. I was booted from Bad Partition at time of crash.

Disk Utility can mount Bad Partition, and I can copy files off of it. Disk Utility can not erase, partition or repair Bad Partition.

Disk Utility has no complaints with Good Partition, and I can boot from it. Best I can tell, Good Partition is A-OK.

I've tried using Disk Utility to erase the entire drive including both partitions, but Disk Utility says it can not do that.

I'm trying to determine whether this is a software issue which can be fixed by some repair method, or whether this drive is a goner and needs to be replaced.

Thanks much!

 

[37Shannon]

Is your external drive the only boot disk you have? If you can boot off your internal drive, you might try the following:

Data Preservation:

- create a directory on the internal hard drive and copy over all files from bad partition that you want to save.
- if you have another external hard disk, plug it in so that it and good partition are both mounted and accessible
- use Superduper or CarbonCopyCloner to create a bootable backup of good partition
- ensure you can boot from the new backup

Problem Determination:

- at this point you have preserved your data and boot environment. Now run Disk Utility First Aid and see if it reveals anything interesting, and if so, repost
- finally, if you have access to a Windows or Unix system, unmount the suspect external hard disk and attach it to the other system, and use that system's utilities to do a full single-partition format of the drive. It doesn't matter what file system you use, because this step is to determine whether the disk can be reformatted AT ALL. If the reformat fails in this alternate environment, you know what you have to do. Otherwise, plug it back into your Mac system and use Disk Utility on it as if it were a new disk.