MacOS X: Repair broken hard drive
You may be able to fix a broken hard drive on Mac again. If there is no damage to the hardware and the hard drive is still recognized, you can save something with the hard disk utility.
Mac OS X: Repair an external hard drive
When your external hard drive makes a mistake, it's time for a scan. Before doing so, you should back up the faulty hard drive, otherwise there is a risk of data loss. To do this, you need another hard drive that is the same size or larger.
- Open the hard disk utility. You can find it under "Programs - Utilities". You should now plug in your faulty hard drive.
- Also insert your backup hard drive. It must be formatted in the HFS + file system, which is also called "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)".
- Now select your defective hard drive on the left and go to the "Restore" tab on the right. There you back up the contents of the defective hard disk to the backup disk. The source is of course your defective hard drive. Enter your backup hard disk as the target medium.
- When the backup is complete, go back to the "First Aid" tab. There you will find the buttons "Check volume" and "Repair volume".
- If it can be selected, you can directly use "Repair volume". The hard disk utility will then scan your hard drive and return a message. However, if your system hard drive is the problem, you will need to run the repair on reboot.
- If the utility reports irreparable errors, then only deleting and overwriting with zeros will help. You can do this in the hard disk utility under the "Delete" tab. Then set the overwriting with zeros under "Security Options". Defective sectors are thereby identified and eliminated.
- Once this is done, you can restore your data. This can also be done under "Restore", but this time replace the target and source medium.
System hard drive defective: Mac OS X does not start
If your system hard drive has errors, you cannot repair them during operation. Perform the backup of your hard disk as described above, then continue with a restart.
- Restart your Mac and be ready to press Command (⌘) + R before the start sound.
- Your Mac will now start in recovery mode and display a menu. Select the hard disk utility there again.
- You can now repair your hard drive here. Use the "Repair Volume" option under "First Aid".
- There can also be irreparable errors here. Then proceed exactly as described above: Overwrite the system hard drive with zeros and then restore the backup copy.
- After such an incident, you should consider a new system hard disk promptly to prevent the loss of data due to a defect.
If you'd rather set everything up from scratch, read another practical tip on how to reinstall Mac OS X.