RIP Mac HD

condra

Hi guys.

Today my Mac started acting weird, Finder crashed, and when I rebooted I had a grey status bar, not moving, under the Apple logo during startup. Eventually the computer just turned itself off.

I powered back on, and it booted into my Windows partition.

I then powered off and powered up, holding ALT for Bootcamp. Windows was listed, but not OSX.

In Windows, I tried HFSE Explorer to access my OSX files, but I'm getting errors. It looks like my OSX partition is skrewed.

I'm wondering where to go from here. Is it a big job to replace an iMac harddrive?
It's a 20" Core2Duo 2.4ghz, so not worth a whole lot of money.

Perhaps there are other ways I might be able to access and recover some data from the OSX partition.

I'm thinking of just saving a bit and buying a new Mac, and keeping this one as an old Windows only mashine...

Any suggestions?

TIA

__

Sent from Vista...:mad:

MACHEAD

Hi there!

The HDD itself is okay as the machine is booting from the windows partition. And it's unlikely that the other partition is banjaxed entirely, it's more likely that the OS X install has been curupted. Try booting from the install DVD and use disk utility to verify the hard drive, if there are repairable errors it will flag them up and give you the option to repair them. Even in a worst case scenario you can do a full reinstall on the OS X partition.

Sad Professor

If you are able to boot into Windows the hard drive must be okay. Try booting from the install disk and repair the Mac partition using Disk Utility.

condra

Thanks for the replies.

It's not going into safe mode (holding shift) or booting to from the install disk (holding C)

:(:(

MACHEAD

Try resetting PRAM if it won't boot from the DVD. As soon as you hear the 'chime' hold down 'Command+Option+P+R' until you hear a second chime.

Then release the keys and see if it will boot normally. If not, try booting from the DVD again, after a PRAM reset this should work. If it still doesn't boot from the DVD, the next option would be to try an external HDD with a bootable OS X install.

condra

Thanks for the reply. I really appreciate anyone banging their heads off the wall with me.

The PRAM chime aint happening. All I get now is a grey screen.

If I hold CMND/OPTION/P/R, or SHIFT, or C, I simply get a grey screen until I release the keys.... Then it boots into Windows.

My brother has a Snow Leopard installer Flash Drive. I'm going to try that hopefully later this evening.

I'm wondering now if I will be able to access data with a USB harddrive enclosure, should I need to swap it out at some point.

UGH. Stress.

Thanks again.

condra

Just for anyone following; I managed to get into Disk Utility with the flash drive.

The OSX partirion was indeed greyed out anf damaged. I managed to reinstall OSX on that partition but its not working. -- it still wont boot up.

Might look into restoring the firmware

MACHEAD

Let us know how you get on. Firmware issues are rare though, but with computers, anything's possible!

condra

Yep the Firmware thing wasnt the answer. I managed to get OSX working by taking a chance and deleting the Windows partition. But OSX takes 3 minutes to boot, safari takes 1 minute to load, itunes 1 minute also, and generally everything is extremely slow.

RAM (4 gigs) is ok according to Rember memory test.

Graphics have spazzed out a couple of times. I would have blamed that on the video card only the soynd has spazzed out too.

Im thinking it might be game over for the logic board.

Currently reinstalling OSX one final time. Its stuck on 31 minutes.

condra

Reinstalled OSX. Still the same - long boot time, 2-3 minutes, long time to load apps. Safari and iTunes both take over a minute on first load, and load quickly on the second load.

Beachball appearing every couple of minutes regardless of activity.

Running Xbench right now.

Disk Test.

Sequential
Uncached Read 0.69 0.20 mb/sec (4k blocks)
Uncached Read 0.91 0.46 mb/sec (256k blocks)

Random (similar scores)

^
I think that might be my problem right there.

New HD needed?

Sad Professor

Certainly all the symptoms of hard drive failure, but I'd still be a bit worried that it could be something else.

Have you an external hard drive you could install OS X on?

condra

Hi thanks for your thoughts. I dont have an external HD right now but my friend was over with his.

I played an AVI video off his Seagate external USB HD and it was perfect. I could skip around on the timeline with no problems.

When I copied the file over and played off the iMac HD it was very sluggish.

So the iMac harddrive writes ok but reads very, very slowly.

Im looking into replacing the harddrive.

Sad Professor

It's definitely the hard drive then. It'll probably stop working altogether after a while.