- Joined
- Dec 20, 2006
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- Location
- Lake Mary, Florida
- Your Mac's Specs
- 14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD
So, I'm working on an iMac for a customer that is exhibiting some rather odd behavior. It's a 2.16GHz, 1GB Intel Core 2 Duo machine running Tiger. The customer originally complained that it was extremely slow, I advised them to run Onyx and do the maintenance tasks. A day later, the customer brought it into me - when he tried to boot it up to download/run Onyx, the machine would simply sit on the blue screen just before the Mac OS X splash screen would normally pop up. It would sit that way for hours.
I booted into single user mode, ran an fsck and later booted off the System Discs and ran Disk Utility. Verify/Repair Disk and Permissions reported no errors, but the machine still wouldn't boot (also wouldn't boot in Safe mode).
I booted up using a Tech Tool Pro 5 disc. Ran diagnostics, but the program kept quitting during the surface scan. Ran the AHT in extended mode, but it found no problems.
So, I attempted to do an Archive & Install. It got about 2 hours into it and was reporting that it would take another 28 hours to complete! So, I let it sit another 2 hours and the status remained virtually unchanged. Discouraged and thinking I had a bad hard drive, I closed the Installer, which warned me against doing so, but I had no choice since I was leaving work and the machine had to come with me.
At this point, I'm fairly certain I'm dealing with a bad or failing hard disk. I booted the machine in Target Disk Mode and made a SuperDuper backup. Although it was fairly slow to do so, it did successfully backup (I let it sit overnight).
So, my questions are:
1. Do you agree with my assessment that I'm dealing with a bad HDD (the machine is only 2 years old and the drive is a Western Digital 250GB).
2. If yes to the previous question, any particular model you recommend? I was thinking of going with another WD, but a Blue edition - primarily to keep the temps down.
Thanks in advance for any opinions or thoughts you might have. I only want to have to open this beast once, since it's not exactly the easiest case to open.
I booted into single user mode, ran an fsck and later booted off the System Discs and ran Disk Utility. Verify/Repair Disk and Permissions reported no errors, but the machine still wouldn't boot (also wouldn't boot in Safe mode).
I booted up using a Tech Tool Pro 5 disc. Ran diagnostics, but the program kept quitting during the surface scan. Ran the AHT in extended mode, but it found no problems.
So, I attempted to do an Archive & Install. It got about 2 hours into it and was reporting that it would take another 28 hours to complete! So, I let it sit another 2 hours and the status remained virtually unchanged. Discouraged and thinking I had a bad hard drive, I closed the Installer, which warned me against doing so, but I had no choice since I was leaving work and the machine had to come with me.
At this point, I'm fairly certain I'm dealing with a bad or failing hard disk. I booted the machine in Target Disk Mode and made a SuperDuper backup. Although it was fairly slow to do so, it did successfully backup (I let it sit overnight).
So, my questions are:
1. Do you agree with my assessment that I'm dealing with a bad HDD (the machine is only 2 years old and the drive is a Western Digital 250GB).
2. If yes to the previous question, any particular model you recommend? I was thinking of going with another WD, but a Blue edition - primarily to keep the temps down.
Thanks in advance for any opinions or thoughts you might have. I only want to have to open this beast once, since it's not exactly the easiest case to open.