ioerror on root disk

dave261266 · #1 January 9th, 2009, 02:59 AM

Booting my iMac after a crash the other ( leopard 10.5.6 ) day I came across the problem that the boot sequence would seem to hang. Visibly I would see the apple logo and the spinning bar and it would sit there.

Thinking that it may be hardware related I booted up and ran the hardware diags but these showed there was no issues. I then booted off the boot cd and ran diskutil to check the os disk and that check said that the OS disk was fine. I was unable to boot into safe mode at all. I could get into single user without any problems and fsck'ing the root fs didn't highlight any errors. So with the fs ok I'm thinking that this maybe an os problem but when I boot with verbose on I see that when it hangs it gets ioerrors on the root disk rdisk0s2.

In order to prove that there was a physical problem I booted up into single user and ran a dd from the os disk and that proved it.

After that preamble, I guess my question here is what should I do now ? Is there an equivilent of the Solaris format command where it could map out any bad blocks ? Or from a safety point of view should I get the disk replaced ? Or maybe I should just reformat the drive and reload the os ?

Thoughts ? I'm a solaris SA by trade and on a dev box I would get format to read analyze the disk and map out any bad blocks but in production I would definitely get the disk swapped so I'm in a bit of a quandary.

Also if I get the disk swapped, should apple swap it as I have had the iMac for less than 12 months ?

Regards

Dave

Satcomer · #2 January 9th, 2009, 06:23 AM

Does the Mac boot into Safe Mode?

dave261266 · #3 January 9th, 2009, 08:07 AM

Nope, as I said, could get into single user and cd but not safe mode. That is unless I was doing something wrong trying to get to safe mode. All I'm doing is holding down the shift key when I turn it on ?

Regards

Dave

Satcomer · #4 January 9th, 2009, 05:22 PM

Well Dave you best bet will be to take it to the nearest appleStore or call AppleCare if you got it. By the way IMHO the best OS X disk maintenance program on the Mac is Alsoft's DiskWarrior.

If you still have the original OS X install disk one of them have a Hardware Test that is a bootable DVD on one of the disks to run a test on the Mac system. See if you run that to see what it says.

dave261266 · #5 January 12th, 2009, 04:21 AM

Will certainly take a look at Disk Warrior, thanks for that.

What I did in the end was reformat the drive and restore from a time machine backup. My only concern is that the disk has a hardware fault which I guess I will have to monitor.

Thanks for your help

Dave