So i think that the hard drive in my MacBook has given up the ghost.

I’m getting a no entry sign on boot up, have tried unsuccesfuly booting into safe mode. Any tips or suggestions?

I’ve got a full recent back up, so if i do need to replace the hard drive it shouldn’t be a drama. Any suggestions for 320gb or larger 2.5inch hard drive, SSD? Looks Iike a relatively simple job to replace but I’d rather not take a screwdriver to it if i don’t need to.

Cheers

G

Ps please let’s not just turn this into a windows / mac haters thread. I like the MacBook for non work stuff, ok?

Dead easy to replace the drive. The instructions will be in manual with the computer or on Apple’s site – it’s considered an end-user operation so even if it was in warranty, you can change disk without voiding it.

Any SATA laptop disk should do you. SSD will give the laptop a new lease of life – it’ll seem like a new machine! A lot more expensive than a spinning disk though. Seagate Momentus XT is a hybrid disk with spinning disk and flash memory if you want a large capacity and some performance increase without spending silly money.

Thanks Euain, managed to get this sorted by erasing the HDD and reinstalling from a backup. Thank god I take backups multiple times each day, lost nothing. In fact, the macbook seems to be running even better now.

I need to time machine this sucker!!!

The mac lives on!

I would check that drive out. There is not much to do it natively in OSX, but at least go into Disk Utility and run Verify Disk – check the S.M.A.R.T. status is Verified and no errors come up.

Note you have to verify the disk, and the volume on the disk.

If you don’t do both, you just check the partition table or the filesystem.

You can boot into recovery mode (boot holding cmd-R) to do a repair (rather than just verify) or boot off an install disk.

IMO disks are so cheap I’d not risk a dodgy one, replace it.

How many backups do you keep? What if you’re now overwriting your backup with dodgy data from a failing disk…