What's happening with my iMac hard drive?

I was on Disk Utility the other day, and a message was displayed on my screen. It said... "This drive has a hardware problem and cannot be repaired. Back up as much data as possible and replace the disk. See an authorised Apple dealer for more information." This message was referring to my 1TB ST31000528AS internal iMac hard drive. What is causing this problem? Does this have something to do with the fact that BOOTCAMP was installed on my computer? What should I do?
Thanks in advance.

Contact Apple or your local AASP > Apple - Support - iMac - Service FAQ

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What´s happening with my iMac?

After all, sorry for my english.
From a couple of months ago, when I turn on my iMac I can see stranger lines and colours on the screen. Once OSX is ready, lines disappear. Yesterday I take a photo with my celular phone: http://personales.ya.com/atleticomania/macu/Imac.jpg
I´m very afraid, ´couse this is the second time I have to repair my Mac.
Any ideas of what´s happening?
Thanks
iMac Intel Core Duo Mac OS X (10.4.6) 17", 1024 Mb Ram, 160Gb HD

I also would take it in to be checked as mp24 suggest!
Or send it in if there is not a service center near you, here's the link for service request.
http://depot.info.apple.com/imac/
Dennis
17" iMac Intel Core Duo 1.5GB Ram Mac OS X (10.4.8) Maxtor 300GB FireWire 2G Nano

What to do with old 30GB hard drive after replacement?

Hi everybody,
am going to replace my 30GB HDD with a 160GB HDD the next days, I am preparing everything around, as I am going to do it byf myself. One question besides all the data-saving, backing up and shifting to other drives is becoming increasingly interesting:
What do I do as soon as all the contents of the old drive are secured somewhere? Do I run a full erase on the drive? How can this be done?
(Sorry for the stupid quote, but the picture of a snake comes to my mind that eats up itself and whoops?!... away it is. ) I understand how to safely erase almost everything but the OS cannot be erased, correct?
Thanks for a hint,
I appreciate it.
Cheers,
Keywan

Once you have the replacement and file/data transfer done, you can pick up a HD enclosure for about $20-30 at most any electronics store and put that 30g drive in it. Then you can erase it and use it as a removable HD. I will do that when I upgrade a HD, no sense trashing a perfectly good HD, even a smaller one, when you can still use it for the price of an enclosure.

HT201250 I use Time Machine to back up my entire computer with my external hard drive. I am getting a brand new iMac this month and was wondering what is the process of using this back up to restore my new computer exactly how my old computer was?

I use Time Machine to back up my entire computer with my external hard drive. I am getting a brand new iMac this month and was wondering what is the process of using this back up to restore my new computer exactly how my old computer was? I want to make sure I will still have various important files on my new computer, like my songs in iTunes, my photos in iPhoto, etc, etc. Thanks so much in advance!

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
When you turn on the new iMac for the first time, Setup Assistant will ask you to restore a backup, so connect the external disk and follow steps to restore all your files to your new iMac. Your new Mac will have the same settings and programs as your old computer.
In other cases, I would recommend to restore the whole backup without using Migration Assistant or Setup Assistant, but a Late 2012 iMac uses a special OS X build, so the OS X version that you're using on your old Mac won't work on the new one. For more information, see > http://pondini.org/OSX/Home.html

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Lost my hard drive and also an Ipad, but have 7 k photos on a Touch that I need to load on fixed IMAC with a new hard drive, how do I do it. (There were more photos than the 7k, but they were saved on other drives, thank goodness). 7K pohotos on the Touch are no where else, must be saved! Just never went from a Touch to iMac. I have the cable hooked up and then what, I don't want to mess up,my last chance to save 7k pics! New Aperture and IPhoto on IMAC with no other photos loaded on the new hard drive yet.

I'd ask in the iTouch forum where there are more iTouch users there than here and they should know how to off load the photos. It might take a 3rd party app.
OT

I've just bought a new iMac with 2 TB hard drive. Can I partition the startup drive?

I've just bought a new iMac with 2 TB hard drive. Can I partition the startup drive?

Glenfern wrote:
The reason I'm considering partitioning is - I'm going to transfer about 50 GB of family photos & music to the iMac. Over time the photos & music library is going to grow. My idea was to point the iphoto & itunes library to the new partition so that the application programs (that will will reside in partition 1), will not get congested with photos & music over time & degrade performance. Also, I dabble a little bit with the music editing program LOGIC & Sound Track Pro, which creates lots of little music files in the process.
In your case I would strongly recommend against partitioning, as dwb mentions a drive loaded with data on an
O SX system doesn't equate to performance loss. However partitioning does. If you were going to tell me you were partitioning to load different OS's on the computer then you would have a good reason to think about partitioning. My suggestion is do not partition.
What I would also recommend is getting some high quality high speed external HD's to store your photo and music libraries on. This helps keept the 2GB drive available while maintaining performance. I have 3 external HD's attached to my iMac, two are backup drives (1 Time Machine & 1 Bootable Clone) the third drive is for storing my my music, photo & movie libraries on. If you go this route the 3 drives I'd recommend are:
http://g-technology.com/products/g-drive.cfm
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?id=10330
Personally I use the Lacie's however OWC or G-Tech would also be welcome on my desk.
Again if you want to take this path Apple has instructions for how to move the libraries to EHDs, if you want those links let me know.

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My mid 2007 24-inch iMac has a 500Gb hard drive that is always running out of disk space, so I want to replace it with a 1TB hard drive.
What make/model is recommended? I do not want somthing that is going to overheat oe fail after a few months.

Any 3.5" SATA drive will work, I'd recommend visiting www.macsales.com, they specialize in Macs and help steer you to one that is best suited for your iMac. Also rather than changing the drive why not buy an external HD to store data on. If you needs are typical of most users your music, photos and movies are taking a lot of HD space. Apple makes it easy to move those libraries to an EHD, they even explain how in these articles:
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iPhoto: How to move the Library to an EHD
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What is the most efficient (in terms of cost) way to transfer 35 mm slides to my iMac hard drive?

What is the most cost efficient way to transfer 35mm slide images to my iMac hard drive?

This gives you the basics
http://www.tech-faq.com/how-to-copy-slides-to-disk.htm
The first option, the professional one, isn't the cheapest - but the results should be good.
The second option is very appealing. Some printers come with brackets that can be used to scan film or slides.
The third option is a slide scanner. I haven't used this option, but there's a significant startup cost of under $100.
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Hi,
Thank you for great advice re SuperDuper.
You wasnt to know we didnt live in USA. We will try to get the full retail version of Leopard off the net. We will also phone round the apple resellers.
In the meantime, we are happy running Tiger with the knowledge that SuperDuper has cloned our hard drive in case of a disaster.
SuperDuper recommended backing up the hard drive with a new user account if we were using filevault on the master account. We backed up our hard drive without creating a new user with filevault as we could not read the pdf `Instuctions as preview was not responding.
Is this copy safe to use as a bootable drive or should we copy our entire HD again using a new user account without filevault?
Keith & Shem

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Install or Reinstall Lion/Mountain Lion from Scratch
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What's happening with my iMac hard drive?

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