My Intel Imac G5 hard drive has started clicking on switch on, and not booting up as usual. The boot screen goes to a flashing folder icon with a question mark, instead of the apple icon.
If I give it 15 - 20 mins, and keep rebooting it eventually boots, and then runs stable until I shut down the mac. When switching back on after leaving it for a couple of hours, the problem persists, until again at random it suddenly boots.
When the problem does occur and I boot with the OSX DVD, and go into disk utility it shows the hard drive as a WDC 7.5 GB ROM Drive, instead of the usual 145 GB WDC Drive, so it must be a hard disk problem. When it does eventually boot then normal drive shows up in the disk utility from Leopard. Not sure how this relates to the clicking sound, but at least it confirms the hard drive to be the prob. Trying the Disk repair / permission repair has not made any difference.
Can anyone suggest a fix?
Worst case scenario, if I'm right and the HD is dieing, is it possible to just buy a external USB hard disk, make an exact replica of my current hard disk and boot from that. I don't want to have to open the machine up, tried that before it was too hard to access the internal components behind the monitor panel, Apple are obviously not wanting to make it easy for user's to upgrade or repair their own machines. I don't want to have to install everything again, just basically make a replica of my current drive on an external HD and boot from that.
Thanks,
Italianie
If I give it 15 - 20 mins, and keep rebooting it eventually boots, and then runs stable until I shut down the mac. When switching back on after leaving it for a couple of hours, the problem persists, until again at random it suddenly boots.
When the problem does occur and I boot with the OSX DVD, and go into disk utility it shows the hard drive as a WDC 7.5 GB ROM Drive, instead of the usual 145 GB WDC Drive, so it must be a hard disk problem. When it does eventually boot then normal drive shows up in the disk utility from Leopard. Not sure how this relates to the clicking sound, but at least it confirms the hard drive to be the prob. Trying the Disk repair / permission repair has not made any difference.
Can anyone suggest a fix?
Worst case scenario, if I'm right and the HD is dieing, is it possible to just buy a external USB hard disk, make an exact replica of my current hard disk and boot from that. I don't want to have to open the machine up, tried that before it was too hard to access the internal components behind the monitor panel, Apple are obviously not wanting to make it easy for user's to upgrade or repair their own machines. I don't want to have to install everything again, just basically make a replica of my current drive on an external HD and boot from that.
Thanks,
Italianie