How can I test if my hard drive is going bad? I've looked over similar questions and searched the internet to try to find symptoms of a bad hard drive, but I haven't found anything that seems to be related to my problem.



I have a late 2008 15" MacBook Pro. It has a Hitachi HTS723225L9SA62 250 GB HD. I'm running the latest Lion with all updates.

Recently I've had a few computer failures; first, I was having issues with the computer locking up (staying eternally on the light blue screen—had to be hard powered off) when changing to the high-end graphics card in my MBP. The Apple Store initially suspected a RAM issue, as when they reseated the RAM, it temporarily fixed itself. The symptoms later reappeared, and they replaced the entire logic board.

Less than a month later, my display stopped working. The computer worked fine, as did the graphics card, as long as I was using an external display. They replaced the display (about two months ago), and it's been working since.

For about a month now, my computer will hang at random times. Most of the time, it happens with Safari (this may be because it's my most-used application, though)—the UI is completely unresponsive, I can't quit Safari, I can't change tabs, I can't even click in Safari to switch focus to the window. This will fix itself and act normally after about 10 seconds. This also happens occasionally with TextEdit, iChat, and iTunes. I never had any issues with freezing until recently.

I'm suspecting a possible hard drive failure, as I don't know what else would cause this, except perhaps memory issues. In the past I've had similar issues in an iBook G4 which were caused by the hard drive.

I've ran the diagnostics utility on the install disc, and every test passed.

Does this diagnosis sound reasonable? What can I do to further test my computer's hard drive and other components?
When i am having all sorts of issues like you describe, i try booting up from Disk Warrior and running its tests.

From your description of symptoms I would suggest that it is a possibility your laptop could have directory, memory/RAM or even at its most extreme, motherboard issues.

Apple's Disk Utility only goes so far. Oftentimes the issues it discovers are caused by other problems from the machine. The best indicators I have seen to an HD failing involve files not being able to write to the disk, or files becoming corrupted. Also, if parts of the System files become corrupted, you would see finder and other system issues ... Like you described. A previous poster's suggestion of booting from another drive is a good one to eliminate this as a possibility. (I use an external HD instead of a memory stick.) 

The absolute best safe guard against losing data on a HD is regular back-ups.