• Loud Clicking Noises
• Bad Sectors
• S.M.A.R.T. Status Failure (not necessarily accurate…)

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any prior warning. My drive refused to mount late last year with me thinking a cable was loose. It was worse. I smelled burning coming from the hard drive. On closer inspection, this is what I saw:

The logic board had fried and I was able to clearly see a burned area.

This is a 250GB Seagate Hard Drive (PDF specs).

Fortunately, I had a backup of about 90% of the files on the drive. There was some work that I had not yet backed up as it hadn’t reached that cycle yet.

I knew my normal methods of getting data off a drive wouldn’t work:

• Taking the drive and shoving it into an enclosure
• Putting it into a spare machine and running SpinRite for days

This was because the drive is not detected in the BIOS during a boot-up. I decided to leave it alone as I thought it was hopeless.

A few months later, I saw a website about drive recovery, I suspected that I could pull the logic board of the drive and not void my warranty.

I managed to find another drive that had the same model number in another computer. I quickly took apart the drive and swapped the logic boards and then put it into my enclosure. It Mounted! I transferred everything I hadn’t backed.

Since it was under warranty, I decided I wanted to RMA it back to Seagate. I formatted the drive using a 7-Pass format to reduce as much possible data recovery as possible. Then, I swapped the defective logic board back in and sent it to Seagate.

A few days later, my new drive arrived! It was a refurbished drive of the same model. Yay!

What I learned:
- Hourly Backups (to another drive)
- Daily Backups to Internet (Apple iDisk)
- Buy Drives in Pairs (spare logic board and backup usage)

What have you had to do for data recovery? I would love to know. Please comment =)

Heat has always been a concern when I was working with my laptop. Unfortunately, it has become more apparent recently with my 16-month-old MacBook. The fan speed would go up to maximum of 6214RPM (rotations-per-minute) for just going to a few websites, especially when playing flash video.

The temperature, when new, would max at around 65-70℃. It is closer to 85-90℃ now. This would especially happen when I hook up an external monitor to it, which I do often at my desk. This is expected because it is using an Intel Integrated Graphics Card (GMA950). What I am using to measure the temperature is smcFanControl2, a donationware application can adjust the minimum fan-speed as well as monitor the temperature.

Typical Temperature and Fan Speed:

Fortunately, all of these temperatures are within Intel’s Processor Thermal Specifications of 100℃ (MacBook & Thinkpad). Therefore, it shouldn’t damage the CPU. But, I am just not used to having a loud annoying fan running all the time when I’m trying to concentrate on what I’m doing. Maybe that is just how I tend to work and it may not be as annoying to others. Recently, I have been using my Thinkpad a little more often for some Windows work and it is near silent even under load. Remarkably, even if it’s running a second monitor at 1680×1050 resolution.

Specs:

Apple MacBook Late 2006 Edition (Core 2 Duo T7200 – 2.0Ghz)

• Idle: 45-50℃ (4400RPM, set using smcFanControl2)
• Load: 85-91℃ (6200RPM)

IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R50e (Intel Pentium-M 725 – 1.6Ghz)

• Idle: 35-40℃ (silent; managed through Notebook Hardware Control)
• Load: 70-77℃ (near silent)

If anyone has thoughts on this or similar problems, please leave a comment. I’m exercising my options to see whether I will do some repair work on my MacBook, as it likely has too much thermal paste appied (similar to: Air & Pro).