Hello,
I’ve had a 24 in. iMac for nearly 5 years now…lately it seemed a bit sluggish. Today that sluggishness turned into something much worse…it appears that my hard drive is kaput! I’ve tried using the disk utility from the startup disk, but am unable to run the first aid…from a few discussions and some searching it appears that the hard drive is dead. Thankfully I have an external hardrive and frequently run time machine…so for the most part I should have most of my files saved.
A couple of questions…
Are there any other things that I might try to revive the machine?
If not…I was thinking about upgrading/replacing soon anyway. Does anyone have any thoughts on desktop vs. laptop, processor speeds, hard drive sizes etc. ( Hope to spend less than $2500ish).
on 16/03/2010 00:56, Rich Gannon at email@hidden wrote:
Hello,
I’ve had a 24 in. iMac for nearly 5 years now…lately it seemed a bit
sluggish. Today that sluggishness turned into something much worse…it
appears that my hard drive is kaput! I’ve tried using the disk utility from
the startup disk, but am unable to run the first aid…from a few discussions
and some searching it appears that the hard drive is dead. Thankfully I have
an external hardrive and frequently run time machine…so for the most part I
should have most of my files saved.
A couple of questions…
Are there any other things that I might try to revive the machine?
Sorry to hear you plight, I’ve been there and found a good backup strategy
plus Time Machine should eliminate most data loss.
Run DiskWarrior, you’ll see if the drive is accessible at all, if it is
DiskWarrior is one of the best apps to recover the data.
If not…I was thinking about upgrading/replacing soon anyway. Does anyone
have any thoughts on desktop vs. laptop, processor speeds, hard drive sizes
etc. ( Hope to spend less than $2500ish).
Most of my web work plus LightRoom, some of my publication design, image
editing in Photoshop is done on a 2year old MBP which is fine. It was much
better after I upped the memory to 4GB.
I recommend Drive Genius (they use it at the Apple Store). That’s gotten me out of a jam or two with trying to just get anything out of the old paperweight as well as give me an interface I can understand.
I would not recommend TechTools Pro, as one run of that locked me out of the drive plus the bootup CD didn’t work. When it’s down to the wire, you can’t mess around with it too much before one thing goes and it’s all gone.
DiskWarrior is great as well, so you’ve got options.
I recommend Drive Genius (they use it at the Apple Store). That’s gotten me
out of a jam or two with trying to just get anything out of the old
paperweight as well as give me an interface I can understand.
I would not recommend TechTools Pro, as one run of that locked me out of
the drive plus the bootup CD didn’t work. When it’s down to the wire, you
can’t mess around with it too much before one thing goes and it’s all gone.
DiskWarrior is great as well, so you’ve got options.
I’d also put my name behind the comments above re TTP [don’t use] and DG
[good app although a shade less effective than DW IMHO].
Best wishes Peter
–
================================
Peter Tucker, Oxford UK email@hidden
Thank you guys for your posts. I’ve ordered a new mac book pro…then will look into replacing the hard drive on the imac. This actually is the set up I wanted. (laptop and desktop) I just wish it would have happened by a method of my choosing. I think I ran time machine just a few days before this event, so I hope when the new lap top arrives I will be made whole.
Thanks
Rich
It only runs if it is turned on! The back up hard drive is on a separate power strip that has a printer, and some other stuff running on it. I was in the habit of turning off that power strip each night (after properly stopping/ejecting time machine). Sometimes I wouldn’t remember or need to turn that power strip back on…hence no time machine for at least a few days. I’m going to reconfigure power cords.
If you replace the HD try to get the same make/model that matches the existing one and make sure you have some thermal paste for re-attaching the temp sensor.
I’ve just done a 17" replacing the stock Seagate with a WD and, for some reason the fans now go full blast. I can only think the temp sensor is not quite in the correct place on the WD so I think I might swap it back to a Seagate.
One other point - not sure if this applies to the 24" - you don’t need to detach the SATA connection on the logic board. I did and the plug and socket came off the board leaving the bare pins exposed. I was extremely lucky to get it back again.
Thanks for the tips. I did order a replacement hard drive and am planning to do some Imac surgery when it arrives. I have found a few good youtube videos demonstrating the process. Hopefully I won’t screw it up.
If you want to give yourself nightmares, hop over to iFixit where they are discussing problems with swapping drives on the current aluminium iMacs.
Apparently Apple use non standard cables - one for Seagate, one for WD and another for Hitachi, together with their own firmware, so you can’t use a stock OEM drive as it disrupts the temperature controls. I believe the drives for iMacs have a special prefix to the maker’s model number, but you’d need to read up about it.
If you were interested, OWC - I’m guessing you’re in the US - might be able to supply them, otherwise you’d need to get them via Apple.
There are ways round it like shorting out two of the drive pins, but I think you really, really need to know what you’re doing before you attempt it.
I can understand why Apple do this since it’s part of the engineering that makes the product what it is, but there’s no doubt it’s a pain when it comes to working on them.
Mine is an older model, non-aluminium so hopefully that will mitigate the problems.
The 13 year old kid on the youtube video makes it look easy! How hard can it be? Famous last words, right?
Thought you’d be OK. Took me about an hour, but a lot of that was spent trying to get the SATA cable connected back to the main board without bending the exposed pins.
I have not used time machine as I trust 100% superduper, it copies only files that are required to update the copy BUT the copy is a fully bootable version of your drive, if you have any problems all you do is run it in reverse, has saved my bacon several times, I have an extra 500Mb internal drive with a full copy and an external LaCie Firewire drive with a copy also. If you need to you can run a Time Machine backup to one drive and Superduper to an external Firewire, best of both worlds and total peace of mind, best $27.95 dollars you will ever spend.
Oh and the other valuable piece of software that will warn you days or certainly hours ahead of a possible hard drive failure is SMARTreporter, it just puts an icon in the menu bar, runs green if ok, yellow if it detects possible trouble and if it turns red, back up everything immediately and wait for the crash ! And it is donationware, so free if you want but a small donation would probably help the developer ( it’s not me btw )
