[brickcam]

I have been hearing strange noises from my ibook g4 hd over the past few months: whining, clicking. I know what a hd usually sounds like, and occasionally mine sounds distressed. The performance is fine, and S.M.A.R.T. and every other utility says it works fine.

I'm bringing my 'book in for other warranty-covered repairs soon, and my question is this: how do I force a failure of my hard drive in a way that it could not be wiped and reinitialized, and also without having to take it out? If I can, I'll be able to get the hd replaced under warranty as well.

This is a question about pragmatics but I'm not blind to the moral issue if you want to comment on that.

[Waragainstsleep]

Back up your files and ask them to replace the drive anyway. Even if they refuse, as long as you keep proof that you told them the drive was failing (before the end of the warranty), they will probably swap it for you now, but if they don't they will have to swap it when it finally goes (as long as it doesn't take too long about its death throes).

Any engineer worth his sodium chloride knows the telltale click of a dying HD, even if SMART reports all as well.

Have you run diskwarrior on it? DW has a habit of reporting no probs on SMART, but then you try to replace the directory and it will take ages and say "speed limited by drive malfunction" or words to that effect, under the progress bar.

[jabackes]

run final cut pro, express your fave flavor, or just go get a large video file and start playing it, this will kill the drive totally, be warned.... back up first, then play that video file Quicktime FCP FCE, and then just drop it onto carpet, something that wont ruin the outsides, but give it a good jar. that will allow the read-write heads to come into contact with the drive's platter and will corrupt that one sector, with any luck that will be at the beginning of the disk, or even just do it during startup... so try that out... again, backup before you try it, and again, soft, but firm surfaces to make disk go sad....

[Lateralus]

Uh... No.

Force-killing parts so that Apple will replace them is not something that I'll allow to be discussed here.