dead hard drive?

[davidt]

I've been given a imac flatscreen to look at which at 1st glance seems to have dead hard drive.
I'm not that great on macs, so I hope someone can help me.
The 1st symptom is that it comes up with the apple screen and rotating disc, but hangs there forever.
The guy had lost the 1st disc of the v10.2 installation CD, bu had the original v10 one.
I tried re-installing v10 from CD but when it came to the screen to choose the destination drive, nothing came up but the CD, and all options were blank.

Whats worse is that he hadnt backed up in a while and quite a bit of the data is important!

Any suggestions as to how to restore or at least get the data out would be much appreciated!

Thanks

David

[raptorhigh]

I'd suggest you check the physical connections to the drive. If anything is loose, that would cause this problem. If the drive is infact bad, there isn't a whole lot you can do. It's very expensive to have a drive restored.

Good luck, keep up posted.

[JOD8FY]

Try going to applications>utilities>disk utility and select the hard drive and check the SMART status. If it says verified, the drive is ok. If it says about to fail, then it's about to fail.

Good luck,
JOD8FY

[davidt]

That would be great if I could get into the OS!
At the moment I cant get past the opening screen of the boot.

Thanks

David

[LeeTom]

I would not use the 10.0 install disk. 10.0 was very buggy, and came out before the iMac with LCD screen, if I remember right. Find at least a 10.2 install disk, or you're wasting your time.

Lee Tom

[JOD8FY]

That would be great if I could get into the OS!
At the moment I cant get past the opening screen of the boot.

Then try this: Insert your OS X CD into your computer. Then hit the power button to turn it on. Hold down the C key while it's booting in order to boot from the CD. Then go into Disk Utility and do as stated before.

Good luck,
JOD8FY