Imac / spinning ball hard drive gets stuck

Hi there,
I have an i-mac g-3, but up-graded it to mac osx 10.3 (and all the apple updates)
It now seems very, very slow.
1) It often gets into a right pickle, for no reason, and the ball just sits there spinning- the only solution is a cold (mains off) restart - it wont respond to anythng else, just spinns the ball.
2) it often sends the hard drive winding and realy gurgling away (not just free spinning) like its read/writing the hard drive - a LOT!
This then brings my mac to an almost go-slow, or just freezes me out with the spinning all again (see above)
these seem to be happening with frightning regularity now, but often without provocation (ie not even during a download, sometimes when its just sat there??)
any thoughts,, thanks,,

Hi,
One thing that's not mentioned in Ferd II's links are the possiblity of bad blocks on your hard drive. They might develop over time, and can cause symptoms like what you're mentioning. To see if the problem might be bad blocks, you can open the Console application from your Utilites folder and look in the system.log.
You're looking for messages from the kernal that mention "I/O error" as the problem. The error will be on a line with a date and time, computer name, and then this:
kernel[0]: disk0s9: I/O errorThe numbers in the disk0s9 might be different, in particular the last one might not be "9".
If you do have these errors, you'll probably want to back up all your information right away, as it's a sign the drive might be failing.
You can use a program like TechTool Pro to do a surface scan and see for sure if there are any bad blocks. If there aren't many, they can be remapped by erasing the drive using the "Write Zeros" option in the Disk Utility. If there are too many, the drive can't remap them and will need to be replaced.
One final thing: just because the S.M.A.R.T. status is "Verified" doesn't mean there might not be a problem with the drive. On the other hand, if it says "About to Fail", believe it, and make sure you have a good backup of your data.
charlie

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