An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox

Three weeks ago the hard drive in my MacBook Pro went bad. So far as I can tell, I didn’t lose a single byte of data. Here’s how.

First, what happened. I was on vacation for a few days with my wife immediately after Macworld Expo. Thursday 18 February was my first day back at home for a normal day of work. When I woke the machine up from sleep, everything was terribly slow. Closing windows. Opening new windows. Switching between apps. These things were all taking 30 seconds or longer. (I’d last used the machine on the airplane on my way home the night before. I noticed nothing wrong then.)

This was bad news, of course. So I saved everything that was open and rebooted. I gave it some time but the login screen didn’t appear.

So, I forced the machine to shut down and rebooted from my Snow Leopard installation disc. I ran Disk Utility and attempted to verify the MacBook Pro’s internal hard disk. Disk Utility reported that the disk was damaged in a way that it could not repair. This is extremely bad news.