Hard drive may be on it's way out - what now?

Question

I have a CoreDuo 1.83GHz white iMac, in the past month or so the hard drive has begun acting up (most recently permissions going haywire, losing printer drivers and unable to add any), Disk Utility has reported problems which it has managed to fix (booting from the install disc) but two problems in about a month does not sound good.
Is there a free tool for checking the hardware health / status of my hard drive? Something that I can run on the iMac as-is, non-destructive. I am pretty low on internal HD space anyway so an upgrade wouldn't go amiss.
I'm led to believe that these iMacs are tricky to get into for maintenance, however I am competent with a screwdriver and computer innards so would like to give it a go. Are there any good tips or pitfalls to avoid when doing this? I saw a guide online for upgrading the CPU to a Core2Duo, I could use this for the part about getting into the machine.
http://www.maclife.com/article/createupgrade_your_imac_to_a_core_2_duoprocessor
Thanks for your advice!
PS Just out of interest, if I were to upgrade to a Core2Duo what would be the latest version of the chip that I could fit? In the guide they fit a T5600 but that was written over three years ago.
Message was edited by: Jonathan Mortimer

Answer 1

{quote:}The thing is that I really like my white iMac, I'm not at all keen on the shiny metal look of the new ones (especially not the gloss screen, that's just wrong and impractical for me){quote}
I know exactly what you mean, that's why I'm still using my 17" iMac with a connected 21.5 LG display.
{quote:}Hmm. I have freed up some space so I now have 51GB free, however I am a little puzzled as to where all of the remaining space has gone. It is a 160GB hard drive (152GB), my home folder uses about 73GB, that leaves about 80GB! I know OS X only uses about 6~8GB so where is the rest of the free space?{quote}
The Drive could be somewhat fragmented because of iMovie, you might want to clone the Internal HD to an External Hard Drive and then back using the Restore feature in Disk Utility or SuperDuper. All-though I advise using a second dedicated External HD (FireWire 400 is faster than USB for cloning the OS X), so that you have a second untouched backup on your 1T in case something goes wrong. If you decided to swap the Internal HD to say a 320 or 500GB then a second External HD or USB/Firewire enclosure for your OEM 160GB drive will also come in very handy for restoring the OS X to the new drive and later backup or storage.
In short: I never trust or rely on just one drive Internal or External with any of my data and always keep it on no less than two drives....
I will help some folks that want to swap out there Internal HD and some that have already made a mess inside there iMac. But the two biggest problems are: (1) the White Intel iMac's are most difficult to open and work in without damaging other components in the process. (2) internally they tend to run hot and at 4 years old, Display connections, Display cables and pretty much everything else is very brittle and easy to damaged.