[DM-MUG] problems with MacBook Pro [small one] in Chile

[Matthew Nuzum]

I had a maxtor hard drive that gave an audible notification when it was
failing. I liked that feature a lot. Had the case been too well insulated or
I been unable to hear the beeps then the only way I'd know is if I (or the
computer automatically) used a SMART drive monitoring tool that gave me a
visual notification.

I had a server once with SMART monitoring built into the system bios. When I
rebooted it one time (purely coincidentally) it alerted me to the impending
failure before booting. It gave me a, "hard drive #1 is failing, press any
key to continue" type of error message.

The point is, there are monitoring tools based on SMART that will alert you
when the drive starts generating an abnormal number of errors, which is a
warning sign of impending failure. It may be that you have hours or minutes
left, or it may be that you have months left.

You have to run the tool over a long period of time though. It will gather
statistics at regular intervals from the drive (this takes only a split
second to do) and look at the statistics to identify abnormal behaviour. If
your drive is failing the SMART won't know if the number of errors it's
measuring are typical or atypical.

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Jon Thompson <jon at mac-consultant.com>wrote:

> If the beep is from the hard drive, then no. If it is a Mac OS X Beep, you
> can turn on the flash screen option in the Universal Access SysPref.
> On Oct 21, 2009, at 12:27 PM, Stuart Thiessen wrote:
>
> Just curious as a Deaf person, any visual notifications we can look for
> instead of the beep? :)
> Thanks,
>
> Stuart
>
> On Oct 21, 2009, at 10:35 , AB wrote:
>
> Apple Care will pay for shipping if she bought Applecare and it has not
> expired.if it beeps on start up with a ?mark it is a start up systems folder
> issue and she's lucky if it boots and should not shut it down untill she's
> sure she wants to and willing to accept it may not start up again. I'd call
> Apple. or to circumvent the $50 phone call tech support fee for
> non-applecare products, she could call an Apple Store and ask the Genius,
> then she'd have to find a certified and authorized Apple Technician to work
> on her laptop in Chile.
>
> Sounds similar to the warning beeps I've had with harddrive or motherboard
> issues.
>
> -AB
>
> --- On *Tue, 10/20/09, Victoria L. Herring <VLH at HerringLaw.com>* wrote:
>
>
> From: Victoria L. Herring <VLH at HerringLaw.com>
> Subject: [DM-MUG] problems with MacBook Pro [small one] in Chile
> To: "MUG Des Moines" <dmmug at dmmug.org>
> Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 1:51 PM
>
> Our daughter has a 12/13" MBP and is in Chile in a tiny town.  She
> just called [Skype] and says that the machine is running really slow,
> takes a minute to open up applications and it beeps at her.  She is
> running Tiger still.  She is also moving off the computer everything
> she wants to save.
>
> Any thoughts on what is going on or what she can do?
> --
> Victoria L. Herring, Des Moines, Iowa. Blogs:
> http://blog.JourneyZing.com  [photography];
> http://www.herringlaw.com  [civilrights/discrimination];
> http://victorialherring.typepad.com/serendipity/  [personal].
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-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter
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