When I try to turn on my 27'' iMac I get a circle that appears with a line through it does this mean my Drive is shot?

Question

when I try to turn on my 27'' iMac I get a circle that appears with a line through it does this mean my Drive is shot?

Answer 1

Not necessarily. We use a product called Scannerz to test hard drives. They have a book on hard drive troubleshooting that you can download here:
http://scsc-online.com/Downloads.html
Scroll to the bottom of the web page and download the Hard Drive Troubleshooting book. You won't want to read the whole thing, just the section describing your problem. Most of the stuff they describe in their "advanced" section requires unit disassembly, and the way that section is written I think they're assuming people know how to take units apart without any instructions - in other words it's not written "for the rest  of us." Most of the resets they describe that you might need can be done by anyone.
If you end up buying Scannerz, I would NOT recommend Scannerz-Lite, I'd go with Scannerz with FSE-Lite. It costs about $14.00 more but they keep enhancing the product and adding more applications to it, all free if you own Scannerz w/FSE or FSE-Lite. I'd also avoid FSE all together unless you know a fair amount about the operating system, files, processes, Unix type path names, etc. etc.
If you're lucky that will end up being nothing more than a reset.