IMac hard drive problem

In the last 6 months I have had to rebuild my hardrive twice. All went well and thanks to regular back-ups I have not lost anything.
Over the last week the iMac has ground to almost a stop. Spinning beach ball regularly, back-ups not happening. I turned off Time Machine as a back-up had stalled in the getting ready process. Restarted and later that day turned on Time Machine and the back-ups progessed. As of last night the spinning beach ball is omnipresent. I managed to send one email before it started and it does not stop. Prior to that, when typing, sentences would appear in one hit after a considerable delay. The hard drive quite noisy in the background. Now its a case of open an app, if you can, and I might get one or two minutes before the spinning beach ball and the only end to it is a restart.
Is this symptematic of the hard disk about to die completely? I have tried various applications on and off to see if they are the cause but it appears to be system wide rather than app specific. What is the best software to verify and run a disk repair above that supplied with the OS? Or after two complete rebuilds should I just face the fact the hardrive is past its used by date?
The iMac is a late 2009 27 inch. Does any one have any idea what replacing the hardrive would cost? I live in regional Victoria (Australia) so actually getting the iMac serviced may also be an issue. There is a local supplier here but I seem to know more about Macs than they do which does not fill be with confidence.

What can I say … Apple you have made my day. After talking with Apple Support they have agreed to replace the hard drive in my 4 year plus iMac with a new drive at no cost to me and via the local service centre.
The drives were faulty and part of a replacement scheme that actually ended in April 2013 and the first response was that replacement was no longer valid. However because I had been able to work through and restore the drive twice they have agreed that if I had taken it in when the drive first played up it would have been replaced under the scheme. I talked them through the fact that I had actually been penalised by being diligent and trying all avenues before contacting support and had restored the drive twice. Yes I am happy. Thank you Apple for being a Provider that listens and responds positively to individual cases and not a company that applies a blanket policy that disenfranchises loyal customers.
Should be collecting my iMac from the service centre tomorow. To celebrate I decided to bump up the RAM to max going from the original 4 MB to 16 MB - can't wait to get it back!

Similar Messages

Ello, I changed my Imac hard drive which no longer worked. I installed a hard drive Western Digital 500 GB 7200 rpm SATA3 WD5002AALX 32M Black. Sometimes I see the hard disk in the utility on the Starter CD, but access seems very slow. By cons when I want

Hello, I changed my Imac hard drive which no longer worked. I installed a hard drive
Western Digital 500 GB 7200 rpm SATA3 WD5002AALX 32M Black. Sometimes I see the hard disk in the utility on the Starter CD, but access seems very slow. By cons when I want
install OS X 10.4.2 on the hard drive, I do not see the disk. What is the problem?

Thanks for the help
I started on the installation CD OS X 10.4.2, I used Disk Utility
to partition the disk according to the document that you have proposed. unfortunately
I have not succeeded. When I partition the disk, even if I called it Macintosh HD, it
does not keep the name and it shows disk0s3 instead. I did an erase on disk.
When I mount the disk it tells me that I must repair. When I tried to repair, I got
the following message:
Volume check failed
The underflying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error.
I also had a message:
Invalid b-tree node size.
Note: The disc is new, but it has already been formatted on a computer Imac 27 inch 2011 OS X Lion.
I used a USB 2.0 to SATA cable to adjust the formatting.
What to do to fix it?

Please Help! Hard Drive Problem

Hi, I know there are various other posts with a similar problem but I have tried a lot of suggestions and keep hitting a brick wall. Apologies if this rambles on a bit or doesn't make a lot of sense.
Two nights ago my 18 month old imac refused to start up properly and hangs on the grey screen with the fans blowing at full capacity. I have tried various suggestions such as resetting the PRAM and SMU and then opened disk utility from the install cd.
Verifying/repairing disk permissions got stuck about 3/4 of the way through so I then tried to repair disk which failed. various messages told me that there were "invalid node structure" and that it was rebuilding "Catalog B-tree".
I was then told that
volume MAC HD could not be repaired
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired
when I attempt to repair the disk again Macintosh HD is now greyed out (although i can still select it) - clicking repair disc again this time brings up various missing thread records, then -
invalid sibling link
volume check failed.
opening in firewire target disc mode brings up the usual firewire icon on the imac but my ibook doesn't seem to recognise that any external drives are plugged in.
Any other suggestions? - Is the Hard Drive completely gone or is there any hope? Will erasing the disk and starting from scratch going to do anything? Most of the stuff on the computer is backed up so I am not bothered if I lose everything.
thanks in advance.

Hello Again, Happy New Year!
Managed to get a copy of Disk Warrior Yesterday but now have different problems.
When I try to start up from the Disk Warrior CD the mac does what it should, I click agree to the terms and conditions, the Disk Warrior title screen comes up and then the mac restarts again.
Now rather than hang on the grey screen it goes to a black screen with white text (single user mode???) with the message -
/etc/master.passwd: No such file or directory
-sh-2.05b
If I try to start up from the Mac OS install disc this works "fine" - i.e the computer doesn't automatically restart itself but disk repair still fails.
If I enter Target disc mode my imac fails to show up on my ibook so that I can get to any of my files but it shows up in Disk Utlity, etc.
The Disk Warrior CD works fine on my ibook. I have tried to repair the iMac hard drive on my iBook using disk warrior (iMac in target disk mode).
It gets as far as Step 5 - locating directory data then appears to hang and the spinning wheel comes up. I left it over night and there is now a message saying that
Speed Inhibited by Disc Malfunction.
The spinning wheel is still going and Disk Warrior is still trying to locate directory data.
Any recommendations? The Disc Malfunction message worries me somewhat - will reformatting the disc and starting from scratch do any good or will I just be wasting my time.
cheers

Slow iMac and Time machine won't recognize iMac hard drive

I have an older iMac (2.16GHz Intel) that is upgraded to OSX10.6.7. Recently it has been running very slow (although it did not seem to correlate with any particular install that I know of). I have looked at the Activity Monitor and cannot find anything that is consuming vast amounts of memory (although I can't say that I really know what I'm looking for exactly, just no high numbers). I did a Safe Boot and it is still really slow there (EXAMPLE of slow is taking several minutes to open a program or taking 27 hours to download my pictures (which only took 13 minutes on my MacBook)). I know my iMac could use more memory (1G), but the slow problem is there even if only running one program. I can't find a particular pattern to it, it just hangs up and then comes back most of the time. It did however start shutting itself down recently. I finally got into disk utility (I've been trying to run disk utility and it usually goes into an eternal spin that I can't even force quit - have to hard boot). So from disk utility I ran verify disk in first aid - it says "the volume Macintosh HD appears to be ok." I"m not sure what else I'm supposed to do in here either. So my first question is Does anyone have any other suggestions for the slowness? Second, in the meantime I'm desperately trying to back up my data on the time machine that I stupidly have never set up as a back up. I can manually put files one at a time over there, but if I try to use it as a time capsule (system preferences, time capsule on) my hard drive does not show up as one of the options???? My external drive and the data that is already on the time capsule show up, but not my iMac hard drive. So my second question is How do I get my time machine to see my hard drive or is there another way to get my files to move over there? I realize I'm in trouble, any help would be greatly appreciated. I've tried to provide as much info as possible. Maybe there is something obvious I'm missing.

My own response, or rather an update: I took the computer up to the Genius Bar - my hard drive is bad. They are going to try to rescue my data. For those of you reading this with a similar problem, make an appointment and go to the Apple Store if you can. Mike, my personal "genius" for this encounter, said that stressing the machine when the hard drive is going bad just risks damaging it more. If you potentially have a hardware issue, take it and let them determine what is wrong. They have tools and diagnostics most of us wouldn't know how to use if we read about them here - and they have ways of retrieving data (I hope) that most of us do not have. Please note that disk utility said my hard drive was ok, but the diagnostics they did showed that in fact my hard drive was much less than ok, but it was still "mounting" hence the disk utility reporting it was ok. It is over an hour drive for me to get to the Apple store, and I only wish I had gone sooner.

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

Please help RE retrieval/transfer of imac hard drive to imac Part 2

Absolutely any assistance would be gratefully appreciated thank you. I am computer illiterate and I need assistance retrieving data from a imac hard drive (rest of computer isn't working) to a newer imac. Previously had received help from the forum and found out I needed an external casing (thank you again to all those that helped), but no shops near me sell them, sales person told me Sata HDD Docking (OTB) would be able to do a similar thing. I really suck with technology, so I humbly ask if any patient persons more intelligent than me could help me with some basic questions to help me retrieve/transfer data. Let me know if I need to give details. Any links to guides or tutorials welcome as well, but I tend to second guess myself and fail at basic terms often, there are probably 6 year olds with better computer skills and knowledge than me, so yeah, pity welcome, help even more so. Oh first question am I still suppose to use Migration Assistent or do I just turn on computer with old HD in dock connected?

Okay, I apologize for throwing you the following curveball - it appears the shop assistent I was talking to may not have been as knowledgeable as I had hoped, because I don't think my imac is compatible with USB 3.0? I tried putting it into the dock but nothing happened - it gave me four options, transfer from another Mac, transfer from a PC, transfer from a Time Machine (and something else) and forth option was not to transfer now.
I attempted to transfer from Mac and Time Machine options, but with both the loading dial spun for 10 mins with each with no change. So I decided to try and set up the computer anyway. The internet set up part came up but at the time I didn't know how to set it up, and now with retrospect I assume I have to set that up before I "register this computer" as no hard drive is showing onmy computer at the moment? Sorry for the sudden and strange switch in problems but now that I have set up the internet - could you or anyone else please tell me how I can register the computer details (or why the hard drive icon is not appearing assuming those things are connected - when I did fill those details out before it told me it couldn't send them now and would have to be done later?)
Sorry for being so clueless - any help appreciated.
I am looking up my imacs specs now to see if it actually can access this dock. (thank you once again)

Imac hard drive replacement

Incredibly my rarely used 2011 Imac Hard Drive is toast. I saw they have a replacement program but even though it is way too soon for a hard drive OF QUALITY to be going out so soon as mine - mine is not included in the replacement program.
Which I have a problem with - how odd it is that they had enough trouble with these computers/hard drives to do a replacement program but mine which did the same thing, expired way too soon isn't covered. I've not had use of the computer for 4 months while I tried to fix the problem so it lasted a little over a year.
Anyway I need to know what to do to try to replace it myself as i haven't the funds to take it to Apple for repair. Plus, Apple Computers and me are history I will never buy another after spending over $1200 for a computer that's nothing more than a very large paperweight right now.
How do I know what size and all that?
I may not be able to afford even that so more than likely this is going to be a very nice looking worthless computer going to the landfill.

I Am leaning more toward Kappy's comments, based on your attitude and comments, but I will ask some questions and add some useful comments as I am in a somewhat charitable mood.
Do you still have AppleCare on this iMac?
From your rather blunt comments I assume no, but have to ask anyhow.
This is why I recommend purchasing and registering for 3- year extended AppleCare.
Because of the nature of the newer iMac designs, hardware failure seems more likely or commonplace occurrence. I believe it's more of a excessive heat related issue than anything else despite what Apple has qualified as "normal" operating temps for these iMac models.
Check out the iFixit home site and search for iMac disassembly or tear/take down. Or search for iMac hard drive replacement on the site.
Another option is for you to purchase an external FireWire 400/800 drive as your new boot drive.
Running your iMac from a FW800 drive will be about as fast as running it from the iMac's Internal drive.
If you can afford it get as large a drive as you can afford.
And just for your info, while hard drives can last for years without issue they will go bad, eventually.
Some drives crash and burn faster than others. Especiallly true of the notebook style drives that Apple installs into the newer design iMac. With hard drives, the question is not if they will fail, but when will they fail.
If you had all of your data backed up to an extra, external drive or optical discs to begin with, you wouldn't be so upset about your internal drive dying as your data still would've been intact on another drive or discs in the first place.
I Always advocate for having some sort of backup strategy for your important data in the event of hardware or hard drive storage failure.

Help! iMac hard drive failure No Backups

I bought iMac in 2011 and worked perfectly fine until 4 days ago. The first sign was everything became so slow. Every task took about 2 minutes to finish or the mouse cursor spinning forever. Then I started reboosting the system. The problem remained. The following day, I tried to turn on the iMac. However, within 10 seconds, it shut itself down. I tried reboosting on and off for a few more times. Exactly the same thing happend. I haven't done anything to iMac. I mainly use it for surfing on Internet, listening to itune or using iphotos.
Then I realized, since I bought iMac, I never used time machine or external drive to set up the backup files. I was stupifiied that I never thought about it because I secretely believed that iMac will never have hard drive problem on me. I never even had such problems in all my precious PCs. All my files from my previous PCs are in iMac as well as saved word documents, photos, and videos. It would be the worst thing in my life if I lose all of these files including files that have sentimental values.
I already made appointment with apple store genius bar. But while anxiously waiting for the appointment, I wonder if anyone could tell me a solution to recover all my files in iMac.
Thank you!

This depends entirely on the nature of the failure or if there even has been a disk failure as opposed to a system failure.
You might try reinstalling Snow Leopard:
Reinstall OS X without erasing the drive
1. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.
2. Reinstall Snow Leopard
If the drive is OK then quit DU and return to the installer. Proceed with reinstalling OS X. Note that the Snow Leopard installer will not erase your drive or disturb your files. After installing a fresh copy of OS X the installer will move your Home folder, third-party applications, support items, and network preferences into the newly installed system.
Download and install Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1.
If the above is not possible:
General File Recovery
If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive. Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk. Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads.
The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.
Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.
If the above is not possible, then you would need to send the drive to a disk recovery service such as Data Recovery by DriveSavers | All Drives, RAID, SSD & iPhones. These services are very expensive and provide no guarantee of success.

Mac OS X v10.8.2 Mountain Lion - constant chatter on my iMac hard drive on start-up and no applications running.

When I log in, there is constant loud chatter on my iMac hard drive, before I open any applications, and Time Machine is not doing a backup. It continues sometimes for 10 to 15 minutes. What is running and why is it making so much noise?

This procedure is a diagnostic test. It will make no changes to your system, and therefore will not, in itself, solve your problem.
If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out these instructions.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below to select it:
sudo iosnoop | sed '50q'
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C).
Launch the Terminal application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Terminal in the page that opens.
Paste into the Terminal window (command-V). You'll be prompted for your login password, which won't be displayed when you type it. You may get a one-time warning not to screw up. You don't need to post the warning. If you don’t have a login password, you’ll need to set one before you can run the command. If you see a message that your username "is not in the sudoers file," then you're not logged in as an administrator.
Text will begin to scroll in the Terminal window. When it stops, copy the text output — not a screenshot — from the Terminal window into a reply to this message. Please don't post more than requested.
If any personal information, such as your name, appears in the output, edit before posting, but don’t remove the context.
You can then quit Terminal.
Important: There seems to be an obscure bug in OS X that sometimes causes input devices to lag or stutter after running iosnoop. If you notice this behavior, simply reboot to clear it.

Can anyone recommend software to scan iMac hard drive for errors

Hello Apple Community
Can anyone recommend software to scan iMac hard drive for errors/defects/corruption?
I've been having problems with hard drive for months and it finally froze on me so I reformatted and restored from Time Machine.
Everything is fine now but I just have a feeling I will see the same problems occur because I simply restored to the exact moment from where I was having problems (i.e. Finder crashing/permissions issues/Volumes unmounting/Trash not working/Random error messages/Computer crashing when opening or saving PNG).
I read that sometime Disk Utility doesn't always pick up on a defect or corrupt hard drive. The whole time I was having problems Disk Utility said HD was ok.
Is there software that can do a better job of scanning hard drive for errors and let me know if I need to get HD replaced?
Thanks
Brad

I agree with both. Most important though is you backup your data frequently*:
http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html
That way if a problem should arise, and it is a result of the hard drive actually dying, you won't accidently kill the hard drive in the process of trying to detect errors.

MacBook Pro 15" Hard Drive Problem.

Hello ... I have a MacBook Pro 15" which recently died on me. When I turn it on, on the "gray" screen there is a blinking folder in the middle. Snow Leopard never boots up. I thought that my hard drive died, bought a new one for it. Replaced it and when I boot it from leopard to install it on the new drive, when I was asked to select the volume in which I want it the new OS, there was no drive that I could select. Therefore, I am stuck in that step. I used an external enclosure to see if the drive was faulty, but it came up on my iMac. I also placed the old hard drive on an enclosure, and it came up fine on the iMac. So, looks like it is not a hard drive problem, any ideas on what I can try or might be ... ? Thanks!!

Did you use the disk utility on the Snow Leopard installation disk to partition the new disk. If you don't do this the installer does not see the disk.

IMac hard drive making a chirping noise!!

IMac hard drive making a chirping noise!! Its a quiet chirp that goes along with the hum of the hard drive. It doesn't always do it but I'm worried anyways. Has anyone else had this problem? Is it a problem?

They told me it's likely the CPU Fan - a known issue - and said that resetting the SMU was the first step towards fixing it. I performed that reset, but the crickets in my machine are still alive and chirping. Step #2, as it was told, is to take the machine back to the Apple service center to be repaired. BUT - looking through other threads here on the same issue, it looks like the issue is currently handled by replacing the CPU fan with another identical model and that because the underlying engineering issue has not been fixed, the crickets will return.
So if this problem is not harmful to the computer, I may be ignoring it for the time being.
Regarding the recalls though, where did you find the serial number range for the recall? I should check mine against that list.

Hard drive problem...... Please Help

Hard drive problems
I am sure it is due to my error or mistake but I received a new Maxtor III touch as a replacement for my failed drive yesterday after connecting it I went to Maxtor one touch manager software that came with it and the drive did not appear in the window so then I opened disk utilities and copied my notebook hard drive over to the Maxtor ran permissions on each drive and then closed down my system ! today when I opened my Powerbook with the Maxtor on it gave me the grey screen 2x so I disconnected the Maxtor ran permissions again and everything was fine until i power up the Maxtor and Grey screen again! Help How do I fix this?????

Maxtor one touch III firewire 800 its connected to my Titanium G$ Powerbook I am beginning to think its just another drive failure

I upgraded my imac hard drive to a 2tb drive. how do i use time machine to get my computer back to normal?

i upgraded my imac hard drive to a 2tb drive. how do i use time machine to get my computer back to normal?

Thank you. I followed the faq#14 (using setup wizard from the osx install disk). Everything went just as planned until I woke up this morning and noticed there was no progress on the "transferring documents" meter. It stopped about 1/4 of the way. I can hear the computer working and the bar is somewhat animated like it is advancing but it's not.
Should I cancel and restart or should I wait it out? It already been about 13 hours since I started the process. Do you think it is my time machine or my iMac? Maybe the time machine file is corrupt or something.
Anyway, any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Computer is balky random freezes across apps. Two hard drive cleans later (their scan reveals no hard drive problems) photo shop won't work at all, magic touch mouse inoperable and their diagnoses is corrupted data? Anybody heard of this?

Computer is balky random freezes across apps. Two hard drive cleans later (their scan reveals no hard drive problems) photo shop won't work at all, magic touch mouse inoperable and their diagnoses is corrupted data? Anybody heard of this?

Well, yes, data does get corrupted sometimes.
The trick is finding what data.
By 'cleaned' are you therefor meaning that the drive has been erased and the system re-installed?
Because that's the quickest way to deal with such a situation.
Back up the system first of course,
Add back 3rd party apps one at a time in case one of them is causing the problem.

IMac hard drive problem

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for