Yikes!
I went to play a game last night (Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight) and it hung. That’s odd… it worked before. Perhaps it’s the new Boot Camp drivers… What’s this? The event log says I’ve got disk errors!
Quick, do a backup before it’s too late! Luckily the data on the Mac partition (about 90GB) seems to have backed up without issues. However the Windows partition (last 10GB of the disk) has bad sectors.
I ran ddrecover all day and it got most of the data off. It missed about 4MB of data which was over a thousand errors. I’m currently zeroing out the disk to try and make it usable again (the theory being that writing zeroes to the disk forces the firmware to remap bad sectors for good ones). In any case though, I’m going to have to get a new disk since the number of errors indicates the disk will begin to fail rapidly. Based on inspection of my last backup log it seems the problem has been around for some time now (stupid home-made backup script missed the error message from dd) so since Jedi Knight used to work (ater the last backup) it’s clearly already getting worse.
The trick now is that the machine is out of warranty but it seems the disk itself may not be out of warranty (ie. disk manufacturer’s warranty). That could be fun to sort out…
Update 24 August 2007
A service guy at my local Apple retailer told me that they can’t do anything about my hard disk and that I’d probably need to send the hard disk to the manufacturer (Seagate) but he wasn’t even sure that would work because the drive was most likely purchased by Apple in a country other than Australia. On top of all that, I’d need to pay for someone to take the disk in/out of my machine or do it myself.
So I’m looking at the cost of a new disk (I found a Seagate Momentus 160GB for $149) plus labour (about $60 an hour) or I can skimp on the labour and do it myself but I’m not so sure that’s a good idea, even though there’s no warranty to void.
I’m currently using my internal disk again after running on the backup disk today. I zeroed out the disk and sure enough it now has no problems reading the Windows partition. I’ve restored everything back to it but I haven’t actually checked on the health of Windows just yet. Annoyingly I was not able to exactly re-create the size of the Windows partition. It’s a little bit bigger than the image I stuck on it but Mac OS X sees the filesystem ok so hopefully it won’t be a problem.
