Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Dinosaurbreeder · Nov 13, 2006, 01:21 PM

Ok, so I bought a (new) MacBook about 1,5 month ago. The first one I got was directly a DOA (Dead On Arrival): the DVD-superdrive was convinced that every CD had about 1.76 GB of data on it. Each DVD inserted was recognized as a 'blank' DVD. Went back to my 'local' Apple Store and they told me they had to repair it --> after having some arguments with the store owner, I went back home and eventually called Apple Service. They provided me a new MacBook within a week, and the 'old' one was sealed.

Now I'm having a problem with the new one (By the way, my specs: 2.0 Ghz Core Duo, 1 GB of RAM and DVD-Superdrive, and OS X 10.4.8 with BootCamp 1.1.2).
Today I put it on and suddenly the harddrive was making this strange noise. Everything went terribly slow, like starting up Safari: it took about 30 seconds or even more. Every time I turned the MacBook off, a sound could be heard which resembles the most an electrical generator switching off. I also noticed, that gently tapping with a finger against the surface on the right hand of my trackpad makes the sound go away for about a minute. After that the annoying sound returns slowly until it's maximally irritating again.
At this moment, the sound has dimmed a little and everything seems to be running 'fine', considering the calculating speed. I also called Apple Support, which is free for about 90 days after the purchase of a new Mac. But the best thing they could figure was a PRAM/VRAM (or something like that?) reset, which didn't seem to have much effect --> the freaking noise is still here!

Please, is somebody out there recognising this issue? Is it a dying harddrive, or is this sound due to something else? It's so annoying because at this moment I need my Maccie really hard for programming in Matlab and Matrices. I couldn't find any similar posts on internet!

Thanks in advance,

The Dinosaurbreeder!

seanc · Nov 13, 2006, 01:52 PM

Sounds like a dying hard drive to me, but i could be wrong.

Go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.app, click on the drive and see what the S.M.A.R.T Status is.

Dinosaurbreeder · Nov 29, 2006, 03:34 PM

Originally Posted by seanc

Sounds like a dying hard drive to me, but i could be wrong.

Go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.app, click on the drive and see what the S.M.A.R.T Status is.

Well, you're not wrong, because it was indeed a dead hard drive! Thanks for the tip by the way!

Strangely enough the hard drive told me that the S.M.A.R.T. Status was o.k.. And now I'm waiting untill the 4th of december for Apple to deliver a bunch of new hard drives to the repaircenter (first Apple said it would be the 24th of november)!