Suspicious-Teach8788
Lifer
I noticed that my MacBook Pro sometimes grinds to a halt. Like I'm surfing the web (85% of my work on this computer) and I get the waiting icon. It takes a while to recover sometimes as it seems like it's halted. Going into other apps doesn't work as it seems to go into waiting mode. You can do some limited interaction of switching windows, switching to an already open word processor and doing some stuff, but it seems that's because it's all in the RAM. Anything excessive = HD access and the waiting icon goes up for that app. Sometimes its frustrating because after 5 min it doesn't recover. I've walked away and taken a shower for 20 min and come back to see that it's responsive again. It's been happening more and more now where I feel like my HD is bad.
I've dealt with HD failure since the beginning of the day. I'll admit in college I was rough on my Dell laptop and I probably damaged it mechanically a lot so I just called them up for a new HD. I've dealt with 2 Deathstars and so I was very used to clicky HDs. Over the years I haven't had many desktop HDs fail, but it's happened where I call them up and tell them to RMA and I insist I work in IT to avoid idiotic debugging questions.
My question is how do I know this is HD failure on an Apple? Their SMART system seems to read up fine. I did a "Verify Disk" on Disk Utility and it came up fine. I could reinstall the OS because it *could* be 2 years of crap piling up that causes the system to halt for minutes at a time before resuming, but I'm having trouble recovering my recovery disk. If I were to bet, I'd bet 80% that this is a hard drive issue. Should I plug this drive into my PC or install Windows using Boot Camp and use my toolbox in the PC land? I'm not too sure. I'm not about to disassemble my MacBook Pro either to pull out the HD. It looks a little complicated for my unskilled hands.
What's the best way to go about this? I have Apple Care that goes on for another 8 months or so, but the last thing I want to do is to do the idiot dance around Apple Tech Support and have them conclude it's nothing or blame my software when it is a hardware fault.
I've dealt with HD failure since the beginning of the day. I'll admit in college I was rough on my Dell laptop and I probably damaged it mechanically a lot so I just called them up for a new HD. I've dealt with 2 Deathstars and so I was very used to clicky HDs. Over the years I haven't had many desktop HDs fail, but it's happened where I call them up and tell them to RMA and I insist I work in IT to avoid idiotic debugging questions.
My question is how do I know this is HD failure on an Apple? Their SMART system seems to read up fine. I did a "Verify Disk" on Disk Utility and it came up fine. I could reinstall the OS because it *could* be 2 years of crap piling up that causes the system to halt for minutes at a time before resuming, but I'm having trouble recovering my recovery disk. If I were to bet, I'd bet 80% that this is a hard drive issue. Should I plug this drive into my PC or install Windows using Boot Camp and use my toolbox in the PC land? I'm not too sure. I'm not about to disassemble my MacBook Pro either to pull out the HD. It looks a little complicated for my unskilled hands.
What's the best way to go about this? I have Apple Care that goes on for another 8 months or so, but the last thing I want to do is to do the idiot dance around Apple Tech Support and have them conclude it's nothing or blame my software when it is a hardware fault.
