OS X Topics

Physical Disk Problems

File System Problems

Bad File System?

• UFS
• HFS & Repair Tools

HFS+ vs. UFS

Partitioning: an evolving topic

about: swap

Disk Drive Problems?

Physical Drive Failures

Physical disk drive problems are the kind where the heads crash -- scraping the magnetic media off the surface of the disk platter; the mechanism that moves the heads across the platter stops operating properly or some sealant or glue starts to break-apart littering the disk platter small particles. To the disk heads - which are flying across the surface of the disk - that small piece of dirt is equivalent to mountain. Once the heads collide with these particles they may bounce and crash into the thin film of magnetic media covering the disk platter - creating more particles. The bad news is this type of problem often leads to corrputed and/or unrecoverable data, however you may be able to recover some of your information if you act quickly - either with recovery tools or services.

The good news is that unless it is a catastrophic initial failure, this type of failure should give some warning signs - such as read and write failures on the affected disks in system error logs. These warnings should be heeded.

Disk Drive Noises

If you have 'weird' noises emanating from your disk drive, IBM customer service has a number of audio files which may assist you in diagnosing certain disk drive failures.