Panic Attack!

[beacher]

So, I just finished burning a DVD, and have had no problems, and all of a sudden, things get weird.  Called up Disk Utility, and the little wheel in the app starts searching for the attached hard drives, and just kept spinning!  Headed over to another partition on another partition, on another HD, and "bingo!", the first HD is highlighted in red, and tells me it's failing. . . So, I know I need a new HD, right? And the one that's going under is partitioned and has Panther (which has some apps that wont run under Tiger!) and Tiger 10.4.8 on it.  The other HD, which I'm using now has Tiger 10.4.3 & 9.2 on it, and will keep me going until I get a new one.  I know that I need to back up some of the things on Panther (which I will reinstall) and 10.4.8 also, and since I can still access these, where will I find all the files that are attached to different apps? Shall I just back up the apps folders, library folders, and various Doc folders, or? I cruised through our archives, but didn't find what I needed to know. . .  And will the old HD get any worse if I don't access it, or should I do everything as soon as possible?

Oh, yeah, one other thing, is that it's a 100 gig HD, and only has 5 gigs of free space left; would that have anything to do with anything?

Thanks guys, in advance!

[weldiger]

Hey Beacher. thanks for the punkins!
Someone with more savvy than I will say for sure what to do, but I'm pretty sure that if you only have 5 out of 100 gig left, that is causing all kinds of problems.
What kind of back up do you have?
What can you back up to?
Is there enough space to back up the whole 95 gig on your other drive?

If you have original OS installation disks, I would just back up all your added files first.
Same with Applications, if you have them, you can add to new hard drive.
If you have CD on hand you can copy to them to save most important first.
HTH

Shalom
weldiger

[pendragon]

Sir Beacher,

AFAIK, when you are advised that your drive no longer passes the S.M.A.R.T. test, then indeed that is advice worth taking, e.g., time to get a new drive, and the sooner, the better.

If you can, make a backup (or two). Drives don't always fail gracefully, so a hard crash may happen at any time. And then any data recovery will be quite expensive.  

Sorry for the doom & gloom, but you needed a new drive anyway (I hope).  

[Xairbusdriver]

Right, get a new ( and BIG ) drive ASAP.

The 5G 'available' is probably not enough for different types of use. It is, no doubt, much less than 5G of contiguous space. Frankly, I'd not worry about it now, anyway. Once you get all your stuff off that 'failing' drive you can play with it all you want, but I wouldn't trust it with important data again. Didn't I see someone posting about a 300G drive for very cheap?

Of course, the larger the drive you get, the harder it is to keep it backed up! An endless circle...

[MamaMoose]

Hey beacher. Yep, your 5 GBs remaining may to little for Virtual memory to work. Your S.M.A.R.T. failure indicator may be saying there is something failing in the electronics of the HD. First, as everyone says, go out and get a 250 GB new HD. Bavk up to it using say Super Duper!. Then, if you can, take the sealed out of the HD enclosure or have a tgech do it. Put the old sealed unit (do not open the sealed unit!) and place it in a new enclosure. That way you may not need to replace the entire HD.

Another approach is, AFTER BACKING UP, use  Disk Warrior to clean up your HD directory. If the SMART warning is still there, then erase the entire disk or try using Repair in Disk Utilities.

Clearly, take no chances and backup ASAP to a brand new external drive.

MamaMoose

[Gregg]

Is this 'panic attack' the same as a 'kernel panic'?

[gunug]

While I will admit that I haven't seen everything I think that if it fails S.M.A.R.T. then all you can do is rescue what you can and replace the thing. S.M.A.R.T. is a hardware test built into the drive and it doesn't really care about puny considerations like what operating systems you might have or how you are partitioned or even what utilities you might run ( S.M.A.R.T. warnings are handled at the BIOS level in Peecee's).  Run, do not walk, to the nearest source of a new hard drive and get the thing replaced.  

I really don't think I would personally bother backing up APPs unless there are things there you can't replace.  Back up data, and reinstall APPs when you reinstall the hard drive and the OS!  You don't know what corruption might have already occured in the APP's and the OS!