Last night the hard drive on my MacBook pro failed. It didn’t die completely, not yet anyway. The symptom was that the interface worked perfectly, but any access to the hard drive would stall, I mean for 5 minutes at a time. All I’d get is the pinwheel and nothing else.

I managed to use the disk utility to verify the disk, but that said everything was ok. I knew differently.

I found a tool called SmartMonitor I tried running that an instantly the program said that the drive is “failing” it showed some bad sectors, and that there were 9 pending.

So, now here I am in disaster recovery mode. My lappy is down. My last backup was done at 10:20 last night. That should be recent enough not to loose any data – yay Time Capsule.

I have an OSX Lion Recovery USB. This isn’t the complete OS on a stick. Its the recovery partition only, enough to start the mac connect to the interwebs, download and install OSX on a virgin drive.

Currently I have a replacement drive on order, and while I’m at it a ram upgrade too. I don’t want to take the machine apart again if I can avoid it.

I have my data backed up on my Time Capsule. I have never tried to restore data from it so am nervous about loosing everything.

And so, all I can do is wait.