S.M.A.R.T.

I was all set to install Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) on my 15" Titanium PowerBook G4 last night. I decided to run Disk Utility off of the install disc, just in case, and guess what it found? The 20GB drive inside was in the process of failing. Disk Utility alerted me by displaying the drive's name in red text, and filling the right-hand side of the window with a mildly scary message telling me that my drive was failing and that if possible, I should salvage my data and replace the drive:

Disk Utility wouldn't let me do anything else to the drive, either. No permissions repair or other First Aid procedures. Hard core.

I did some digging, and apparently all newer hard drives come with something called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis & Reporting Technology), which is a self-diagnostic protocol that a drive will run regularly to track things like bad blocks and even mechanical and electronic components.

Cool. I wish it told me automatically, instead of me having to discover it like this. I now wonder if issues on my laptop drive had anything to do with The Crash of 2005, which happened when I was cloning said laptop's drive to my big FireWire drive.

UPDATE Even though it wouldn't let me run Disk Utility, the Tiger Installer Disc let me upgrade to Tiger. Go figure. Of note: Disk Utility 10.4.4 (the version that ships with Panther) and Disk Utility 10.5 (Tiger) handle failing drives differently—10.4.4 won't give you the red text and foreboding message shown above.