Toubleshooting iMac Slow Boot/Slow Safe Boot Issues

I have a 24-inch iMac 2.8GHz. Several months ago I was having issues with very slow bootup and slow response times in operation. For example, I would click the Apple Menu icon, the wheels would spin, and take up to a minute to load the icon. In addition the computer seemed to be running hot. I installed a temp monitor, and the temperature never got above 108F.
I reformatted the harddrive and installed Snow Leopard, and everything was great. Until now…the problem is back. My main complaint is the 5+ minutes it takes to boot up. It hangs for a while on the gray screen with the spinning gear and hard drive is silent. After a while, I'll hear some churning, then the blue screen appears, then it will be silent, and eventually the desktop will appear. Icons graphics are lagged, but once booted, performance is ok. I removed all startup items that were in the Accounts preferences and there were no startup items in the startup folder.
I've tried booting into Safe Mode, and it hangs on the status bar about 1/4 of the way in. I have been able to successfully boot from DVD. I ran Disk Utility and repaired the HD and permissions and there were no problems. I also ran the hardware test from the DVD and everything tested ok. I also booted into Verbose Mode and it hung several times. The last time it hung before I abandoned verbose mode it said: disk0s2: I/O error. It hung there for around 5 minutes and I eventually just forced shutdown.
It is eventually booting...but there is clearly an issue. My question is…what’s the next step from here? I’m leaning towards a bad HD sector, but unsure what the right method for diagnosis (short of bringing it into the Apple Store, which I would like to avoid).
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Message was edited by: vesta75
Message was edited by: vesta75

Your welcome and yes that error confirmed the HD is failing. While Time Machine is a good start, I would strongly recommend getting a second HD and creating a bootable clone of your internal HD. It's wise to have redundant backup's in the event one fails, I've had this happen myself! MacWorld writes articles about having redundant backups all the time. Here are links to two:
http://www.macworld.com/article/157414/2011/02/mybackupplanlex.html
http://www.macworld.com/article/156643/2011/01/howi_back_up_frakes.html?lsrc=top1
After you have done so then it's time to take your iMac into an AASP or Apple Store to have the HD replaced. Please get it done quickly as it's going to fail and they have a nasty habit of failing when you have something important to do.
Best of luck and let us know how it turns out.
Roger

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