Take a look to your hard drive specs: if your MacBook is about one year old or little more and your internal hard drive is a Seagate, there are good chances it's going to die very soon.
You can easily verify if your drive is one of those predestined:
- Launch System Profiler
- select Serial ATA in the left column; on the right one you'll get the specs of your hd

If your hd:
- is a Seagate 60/80Gb (model ST9xxxx)
- has firmware 7.01

you can be quite sure it will fail really soon. I had many returns from my customers of this particular hd models. Those drives dig scratches on the first racks of platters, and are unrecoverable.

You can also find more information about the problem here: http://www.retrodata.co.uk/notice_apple_seagate_drives.php

In case you have one of those drives, back up frequently and try to get it replaced under warranty (as it is a defective product, it could be possible also if your warranty is expired).





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Thanks. I did ckeck this as one of my friend's MacBook drives died recently. It turns out my drive was a Toshiba. I'd dropped my MacBook Pro a few times, so I decided it was perhaps my own fault.

Apple's bug reference is # 5712347, though it is still in an 'open' state.

I got the replacement drive and, in the end, only lost two personal files (though I had to do a full OS re-install, as many of the /Applications bundles had been trashed).

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Just a further note to say that Apple have identified this as a duplicate of bug # 5673197. They don't provide any further information, but at least it points to the fact they are actively looking into the matter.

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