Hard Drive Failure?

I can't start my Mac! First what happened is I would get the flashing question mark folder. After a few restarts it found my Leopard partition and my windows partition. I verified and repaired all disk permissions and ran onyx. I restarted to go into windows and I kept getting the Disk Check during boot. That has been happening for a few weeks now, but this time it was painfully slow. I reset the PRAM. I thought it was a windows problem so I deleted the partition and reinstalled windows. After it was finished installing and it restarted I got a blank screen with a blinking curser. I hard restarted my Mac and held down option and nothing pops up except for the windows disk that is in the CD drive. What do I do?

I have the 2.8 ghz 24" Aluminum iMac with the 500gb hd. I don't know what to do

UPDATE: I pulled the plug and turned my computer on holding option. I got it to turn on in OSX, but now what do I do? Risk turning it off again?

Back up. Do it now. If you don't have a back up drive, run out and buy one.

it's all time machined. What should I do after that?

Run Verify and Repair Disk in Disk Utility (Applications => Utilities => Disk Utility). If it comes up with no errors, run the Apple Hardware Test:

Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test

forgot to add that...did both and said it was okay. I did the extended and the normal test. Both came out okay.

How about a PRAM reset? The next time you need to restart the machine, press and hold Command+Option+P+R, immediately after the screen turns gray. Continue holding until you hear the startup chime 3 times.

oh three times?! okay I didn't do that. I'll try that next time I restart. I did get it to restart and get into windows. Beside the PRAM anything else?

Will it ring 3 times consecutively or do I hold it until it restarts 3 times. I did the latter and it's still slow bringing up my startup disks, but they do show....

gixxersean said:

Will it ring 3 times consecutively or do I hold it until it restarts 3 times. I did the latter and it's still slow bringing up my startup disks, but they do show....

Click to expand...

Continue holding it until it chimes (restarts) 3 times.

okay i did that. For about 30 minutes everything was fine. I downloaded a couple programs then restarted into osx then I restarted again into windows and I'm having the same problem now that I did earlier. Could it be a heat issue?

gixxersean said:

okay i did that. For about 30 minutes everything was fine. I downloaded a couple programs then restarted into osx then I restarted again into windows and I'm having the same problem now that I did earlier. Could it be a heat issue?

Click to expand...

If it were heat, the machine would freeze. I'd lean more toward a failing drive. Is the machine under warranty?

This utility reports on the SMART health of your drive, take a look:

SMART Utility monitors your hard drives' health Review | Utilities | Mac Gems | Macworld

It's 2 months OUT of warranty. I'll try the smart out tonight when I get home.

I downloaded SMART and it says I have 21 Pending Bad Sectors and a total of 53 Errors. Overall SMART Status is Failing.

Should I buy a new hard drive?

Absolutely. That drive is on its way out - can't believe the Apple Hardware Test didn't report that!!

7000 hours doesn't seem that long. Is that the standard life of a HD? Thanks for the help cwa!

Does anyone know a good guide to changing a hard drive in an Aluminum iMac?

No, that is well under the MTBF. Sounds like you had a bad drive from the get-go.

For some reason ifixit.com doesn't have one. I'll have to Google around.

So, I installed my new hard drive. I got a 1TB SATA seagate barracuda. Now I go to install OSX and when I get to the "Select Destination" step nothing shows up. I don't know what to do.

UPDATE: I went into disk utility and formatted the disk. I 'created one partition' and formatted it HFS+ Journaled. It showed up in "Select a Destination" IMMEDIATELY after. Thanks for all the help! Hope this thread can help someone else who has this problem.