Salvation from the click of death

It's not a good day when your iBook starts making noises you know it shouldn't. Referred to as "the click of death," it is generally regarded as a precursor to a fatal hard-drive crash with the only solution being a new hard drive. Fortunately there is a much easier and cheaper solution provided by the repair disk function of Disk Utility that comes with OS X.

When my hard drive first started clicking I got that terrible sinking feeling that something very bad was about to happen. Fortunately the only side effect (apart from the annoying sound) seamed to be a big degradation in performance. While this was obviously a problem, a bigger concern was my memory of an old Amiga virus that would play as song by thrashing your hard drive; an entertaining program until you discovered that it destroyed your hard drive in the process.

I searched on Google for a solution to the problem, but the only references I found referred to it as "the click of death" and stated that that I need a new hard drive. That sinking feeling was getting worse. Reluctant to just give up on my iBook and shell out for a new hard-drive, I decided to try and find my own solution.

On previous occasions I had used OS X's Disk Utility for backup up my hard drive and had noticed a First Aid section, this seamed like the best place to start. There I discovered a repair disk option, unfortunately disabled. To enable the repair disk option you must run disk utility via the installer. The verify disk option was enabled so I ran it in order to determine if there was any value in rebooting enable disk repair. Running verify disk was like moving a refrigerator away from the wall and discovering a huge nest of cockroaches. Red errors were spewing down the output window. Running disk repair definitely seamed worth while. Here are the steps involved.

1. Insert your installation disk
2. Reboot and hold down the alt key
3. You should (eventually) see two icons, one for you hard drive and one for your installation disk.
4. Select the installation disk and click the right arrow (->) button.
5. When prompted to select a language From this screen click on the "Installer" menu and select "Open Disk Utility…"
6. When the disk utility loads, select your drive
7. Click on the "first aid" tab (should be already selected)
8. You will now see and enabled "repair disk" option. Click on it.
9. The disk repair will start and can take some time
10. When it's done, quit from disk utility and exit the installer.
11. You will be prompted to run boot selector, just select "Quit"
12. Your Mac will reboot and hopefully the clicking will be gone and performance will be restored.

My iBook has suffered from the click of death 4 times in the almost two years I've owned it and I've never had to replace the hard drive. If you run into similar problems then hopefully repair disk will work for you too. I should also point out that once the clicking re-occurred within a couple of hours of running repair disk, but running it again solved the problem. You may also find that even if you don't have the click of death, running disk repair can improve performance; I was surprised how snappy my iBook felt again after the initial repair.

 Print This Post

If you like this article, then let other know: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

4 comments.

No Built-In Virtualization in OS X 10.5? »« Using GPL code within proprietory code