Hard drive erasing issue

Ive been having issues lately with my Intel iMac locking up and freezing on me. Today while logging out the machine locked up, the spinning black circle on the screen stopped so i turned off and back on again.
I disconnected all accesories bar the apple keyboard and mouse and i unplugged the mains for 10 seconds and put it back in. The machine then wouold not boot up but got stuck at the white screen.
I tried pressing the apple key when turning on and i got the mouse pointer but no drive loaded.
I popped in my Leopard CD to boot from that and after waiting AGES it eventually showed the CD to click but nothing else. After a further 15 minutes of waiting the machine eventually booted into the CD and i was able to load up Disk Utility.
My hard drive was showing but when i clicked to verify the drive it gave me an error about invalid node.
When i clicked to repair the disc it said something about invalid sibling.
Im opted to erase the disc as i had all data backed up but when clicking to erase it gets stuck at Partitioning map.
I tried this twice with Journaled and Journaled Case-sensitive and got the same thing.
I then opted to erase but with zero Out Data. The zeroing took about an hour and went fine, but then it comes up with Creating Partitioning Map and gets stuck again.
Im at a lose now, can anyone help as it seems my machine is very poorly

HI,
Here's how to boot from the install disk and check the hard drive for errors.
*"about invalid sibling."*
Insert Installer disk and Restart, holding down the "C" key until grey Apple appears.
Go to Installer menu (Panther and earlier) or Utilities menu (Tiger and later) and launch Disk Utility.
Select your HDD (manufacturer ID) in the left panel.
Select First Aid in the Main panel.
*(Check S.M.A.R.T Status of HDD at the bottom of right panel. It should say: Verified)*
Click Repair Disk on the bottom right.
If DU reports disk does not need repairs quit DU and restart.
*If DU reports errors Repair again and again until DU reports disk is repaired.*
When you are finished with DU, from the Menu Bar, select Utilities/Startup Manager.
Select your start up disk and click Restart
While you have the Disk Utility window open, look at the bottom of the window where you see Capacity and Available. Make sure there is always 15% free disk space. Not enough disk space can cause directory corruption.
If Disk Utility cannot repair the disk then your next option is DiskWarrior
If you cannot boot from your install disk, try booting in Safe Mode
Carolyn

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Message was edited by: Dave Swinnard

Dave Swinnard wrote:
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https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18869
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Hi,
Last night, I upgraded my internal hard drive from 20Gig to 80Gig, and I added a DVD ROM drive so I can watch movies (instead of playing CD's only). I ran the hardware test disc and everything passed.
In addition, last week, I installed 512MB of additional RAM. The physical installations of everything was really a lot easier than people in the forum would have you believe, but Pismos are definitely easier and a lot more user friendly when it comes to upgrading.
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Check Apple's Knowledge Base article on restoring your Apple software for links to the proper instructions for your model (which depends upon which software came with it). Most likely, the Restore discs are not startup CD's, so you can't use them until OS X is installed on the computer.
You need the installation disc to initialize the drive and format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
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If you open a Finder window you can also sort by size by clicking the size column header. In view options you can also set it to calculate all sizes so it will also show folder sizes. Although not as handy as the cataloging applications you can at least start tracking down where the disk space is going. With video you can probably just copy half a dozen files off and immediately free up many GB.
Note that this isn't just a matter of convenience. OSX makes lots of temporary files and is doing it all the time. If it can't find space for those files it can result in a serious drive crash and that could cost you several hundred dollars in recovery expenses. A Sig indicates, you need space just for computer operation. I feel the % recommendation is a bit vague since people use drives ranging from 10 - 1000 GB in size. My computer regularly uses 6GB of hard drive space for temporary files, and I like to leave wriggle room, so I usually leave at least 15-20GB. You can check the temporary file usage by looking at VM in Activity monitor.
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Hard drive erasing issue

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