Hard Drive Failure - Advice

Greetings from Greece!

I have a problem with my 2007 Aluminum iMac (first batch). Sunday night I get back home and try to wake my iMac's screen from sleep. Spinning ball. I thought, no biggie, I'll just wait for a few minutes. Tried pressing cmd+option+esc to see if anything happened, like force quit the screen saver (silly me). I had to turn off the iMac from the power button. Then I turned it back on, the OS thought it was a good idea to index my hard drive, so I let it. The indexing took forever, and then there comes that spinning beach ball again. I waited, I waited, I waited, had to turn it off again from the power button. Then I restarted it and there was a flashing folder with a question mark on the grey screen instead of the apple. I installed OS X 10.5 on my external hard drive, tried the Disk Utility on the internal drive but both the verification and the repair failed. I ran DiskWarrior and the report said that the disc was failing (really?). This is the first thing.

About a month ago, I encountered a problem with my iMac's audio output. Whenever I plugged in the ear-phones, the sound kept coming out from the built-in speakers. I tried a couple of things a friend of mine (who is also a Certified Apple Tech) told me, none of them worked. He said that the mother board had to be replaced. This is the second thing.

Apple care and service in Greece are pretty much inexistent (and where there is a little hope for help, you have to pay a lot of money). The only person I know is qualified and crazy enough to deal with these things is in the army right now and can't help. Do you think that the mother board problem and the disc failure could have something to do with each other? Should I just replace the hard drive and forget about the whole thing, or would I be better off buying a new iMac?

Thanks in advance for your time and advice

One love stars

iSoto said:

Apple care and service in Greece are pretty much inexistent (and where there is a little hope for help, you have to pay a lot of money). The only person I know is qualified and crazy enough to deal with these things is in the army right now and can't help. Do you think that the mother board problem and the disc failure could have something to do with each other? Should I just replace the hard drive and forget about the whole thing, or would I be better off buying a new iMac?

Thanks in advance for your time and advice

One love stars

Click to expand...

Welcome to Mac-Forums.

I have a some questions:

1. Do you still have the sound problem...and are you sure it's not caused by your sound preference settings?

Sometimes (I've found) getting sound to output properly can take a little experimenting with the sound preference settings.

2. As far as the hard drive:

- Do you have anything on the hard drive that is super important?
- Does the hard drive still "spin up" when you turn the computer on?
- Does the hard drive make any strange noises when you first turn on the computer?
- Five minutes after you start up the computer, does the hard drive seem any louder while it is spinning?

Thanks,

- Nick

If I haven't got my external drive plugged in, the iMac won't start and I still see the flashing folder with the question mark. All the important data from the internal hard drive have been recovered using Data Rescue II and they're currently sitting on my iMac G5 (and so am I). The internal hard drive doesn't appear in the desktop. The only way I am able to open the iMac is through my external hard drive that has the OS X 10.5 installed.
I checked the sound thing, and even now, with a fresh OS X installation on my external drive, the sound still comes off the speakers instead of the headphones. In case your wandering, I did check the ear-phones and they're OK.