Causes of Hard Drive Corruption in Mac

Are you among those persons fighting with hard drive corruption in Mac? No!! Good luck. Do you frequently browse web to prepare yourself in case it happens with your Mac in future.. Although Mac is designed so safe but still problem of drive corruption and data loss is very common in Mac. So do not get surprise when you see Mac users discussing about drive corruption in most of the times.

Last month a friend of mine came to me saying that his Mac crawls slowly. I booted his Mac drive as using boot DVD and run disk utility to fix the problem. Thankfully it worked at that time but day after it again shows same situation. I rushed to check SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) diagnostics of hard drive to assure that it is working properly. After some research I found the main partition of the drive has got corrupted somehow. Since, this is very common situation so I tried to figure out the causes of hard drive corruption in the Mac.

Main causes of hard drive corruption are:

• Improper Shutdowns

• Force shut down

• System Crashes

• Bad Sector in OS X startup disk

• Defective Hard drive

• Removing hardware during operation without “successfully removed”

• Power supply issues

• Virus Attack

Any of the above bullet point is more than enough to corrupt hard drive and data in corrupted hard drive may be lost. However data is not lost actually it becomes “invisible“ that means data is actually present there but inaccessible!! Although Mac use file system journaling that helps to protect file system from hardware failures and reduces the need of repair but it is not 100% safe.

My friend was facing this because he was not using UPS so once when he was working on his Mac it accidentally shut down. Though this was not first time when system shut down like this because he was using Mac without UPS from last two years. But unfortunately when this time OS X got shut downs it failed to repair corrupted files needed to boot the system,

With Stellar drive stats I find the detailed description of the drive such as volume details, creation date, backup date, file count etc. And then use stellar surface scan to scan for bad sectors. Within few seconds I found the problem it says sector “1056787-1567831” is bad sector in the boot drive.

Now break through is infront of me and things started looking smooth. I do not want to loose all the data present in the hard drive so I prepared image of his hard disk into another external drive and do wipe (zero fill) that drive. Now I have brand new hard drive ready to use. So I initialize that drive again with Mac readable format i.e. HFS+ (journalized). And Lastly restored the image prepared before from external drive to get the data back.