My iMac crashed hard, need advice

Question

I have a 2.8 ghz iMac with 4GBand 500GB HD running 10.6.2. It would not reboot.
About 6 hours earlier, I had applied an update to the EyeTV software, and the update crashed (but the iMac kept running). However, the EyeTV successfully recorded a TV show, and the iMAC continued working for 6 more hours, so I don't know if this is related.
The symptoms were a very long white screen with Apple Logo and spinning gear. After say 45 minutes, this would turn into a blue screen and stay that way.
I have Apple Care on this machine, and they have been very helpful.
They walked my through resetting the PRAM, putting in the Snow Leopard Install disk and running Disk Utility. Repaired permissions (only one was bad), verified and repaired disk (several issues were found here.) Then tried to reboot. Still could not get past the white screen with Apple Logo and spinning gear.
Next they recommended reinstalling Snow Leopard which they said should take 45 minutes. The Snow Leopard install took over 6 hours. When I returned from an errand, I could see my desktop, but there was no dock. I did not realize that the iMac was still booting, so I tried rebooting. It took about 2 hours to reboot, but I finally had a desktop. It was acting very sluggish. A simple Finder operation (like OPEN FINDER WINDOW) might take several minutes. It was so sluggish that I could never get safari to open. I was able to open SuperDuper and note which backup volume was the most recent.
Finally, I shut down the Mac (this took a while) and booted from my most recent SuperDuper volume. The backup was about 24 hours old. I was able to access the Macintosh HD in the Finder so I did a FInder search for all files created in the previous day, and then backed them up to a thumb drive.
I decided to try the following.
1) Used Disk Utility to reformat the Macintosh HD
2) Started a copy of the backup volume from the backup to the Macintosh HD volume.
3) After letting it run for 10 hours, it has only copied 14,000 files out of 1 million, or 29GB out of maybe 365GB.
I will get back on the phone with AppleCare when they open, but I would appreciate your impressions.
Does this sound like a failing hard drive?
What else should I be doing?
Thanks for any advice.

Answer 1

This definitely sounds like a failing hard drive. If you can, fire up the Disk Utility, select the drive (topmost entry in the left column, not just the partation) and see if you get the S.M.A.R.T status at the bottom (bottom right column, usually 3rd from top). It should say SMART verified (if a modern drive fails, it will have a way to tell the computer via S.M.A.R.T interface)
Another thing. If you have Xbench or can manage to install it, run it and see where the performance tanks. If video and RAM and processor speed are okay, but disk/read and write fail this also indicates hard drive. If OTOH video and others are also sloooow, it may be something else though.
(One other thing that could come to mind would be a bad fan, if the CPU overheats it will throttle down, somtimes throttel down hard ... a tool like iStat/Pro could show the temps).
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