2007 24" iMac HD woes/ replacement?

So.... I recently upgraded to a MBPr and gave my brother my iMac. He doesn't really use it, but it will make a good family computer and I think I'm going to buy him a Macbook air when he gets ready to go to college.

However, I'm having issues with this old iMac. It's a 24 inch from 2007 and it started having issues when I reformatted everything and tried upgrading from I believe tiger or lion all the way to mavericks. I got as far as Snow Leopard and then had issues when I tried to install mavericks. Now I've been battling with it. Tried booting in safe mode and tried to even get safe boot to work. Did the verbose mode and got disk0s2 over and over again. Finally went to go get my snow leopard dvd and ran disk utility. Verified permissions and it said it found errors and it was done, but then the drive disappeared from disk utility.

This whole time the HD or optical drive has been making noises that don't sound good. And the SMART thing said the drive was about to fail. And I just restarted it and opened disk utility, and the drive didn't show up. As of right now, I'm assuming it has fully failed, unless there is another option to try to fix it? I figured someone else may have run into this problem before.

Fortunately there wasn't a thing really on the computer, so formatting drives isn't a big deal. Right now I've got the ifixit guide pulled up and was reading through it to see how difficult it was to change the HD myself. I took PC repair in HS and have graduated college and am pretty comfortable around a computer, and, while I had applecare on it for the two years after I bought it, I'm sure the warranty is probably expired and applecare is no longer applicable.

So basically I'm asking:

1) is there any other way to fix it beyond what I've tried?
2) a friend of mine also had his hd fail in his iMac and it was like 200-300 i think to fix, but i could be wrong. and his was part of a recall potentially but something about it didn't qualify him. So far it's looking like it would be cheaper to do it myself and I feel comfortable doing it (i've also always wanted to open it up anyway, so I guess now is as good of a time as any). But does anyone know any price specifics of both (or other) options?
3) I never really wanted to sell it because the screen is decent and I got used to the 24" so my 15" is smaller than I'd like for some of my photograph workflow. Is there anyway to convert it, either replacing the HD or not, to a secondary monitor for my MPBr?

Thanks for any advice you can give. All drives fail eventually, I guess 7 years was a good run.

Thermonuclear said:

I recommend a do-it-yourself replacement. And while you have the thing opened, you can also replace the clock battery which is surely near the end of its life. Also, gently vacuum out any dust which may have accumulated.

Another idea is to get an external hard drive connected via USB 2. Install 10.6 on this and run, although the disk speed will be limited to the 480 Mbps upper limit of the USB 2 interface. When you get that working, upgrade the drive OS to OS/X 10.9.4. You might want to do all of this before opening the iMac.

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I've been scouring the internet since posting and I'm all but certain I'll do that. Now I'm just trying to decide between a HDD, a SSD or a hybrid. Any advice on that? (it used to have a 320 HDD in it)

And I planned on getting a Universal Drive Adapter from ifixit (30$, unless you can recommend another one) because I have an older HDD I need to test to see if it failed or if the enclosure I have went bad. I was going to plug in my new drive via that to the iMac and set everything up before i opened it up.

And clock battery? No idea how to go about replacing that *opens google*


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update:

clock battery doesn't look difficult at all. And have been reading a lot about dust buildup, so will be doing that as well. It just hit me though that I could replace the optical bay (as I have an external optical drive) with a SSD, and put in a HDD in place of the failed one. Thoughts on this?

Fishrrman said:

My suggestion will be different from all the others.
...

I'd suggest a firewire 800 case. If possible, get one that has BOTH firewire 800 AND USB3.

The case can be for either a 2.5" drive, or a 3.5". These days, I don't see any drawbacks to buying 2.5".

You can find enclosures, drives, etc. at places like amazon and newegg. You can find price info at dealmac.

Once you have your external booter set up and running, I'd try to re-initialize the internal drive and see what happens. If it won't reinitialize and "test out", I'd just "leave it in place", "retired", so to speak...

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I actually have a desk external that I don't really use, except as the occasional secondary backup for photographs. I suppose I could just connect that to my iMac and boot that way? I honestly don't plan to ever use this iMac as much as getting my parents to, and when iDrive comes around, I'll have them save most everything they ever do on there anyway.

So my biggest question is: What's the slowdown for booting that way, and will it slowdown the rest of the process?

Intell said:

There's no need to replace the clock battery. Those have a 10-15 year life span as long as the computer has been plugged in most of its life. This model iMac doesn't get very dusty inside, but blowing it out with compressed air will clean it up a bit. Don't remove the logicboard unless you have to, they can be difficult for some people to put back in without damaging it.

This model iMac has a PATA optical drive interface. A SSD on the optical drive bus will be slow and slightly a waste. If you still want to put one there, get an optibay for a 2006-2008 Macbook. They make them with a built in SATA adapter that uses the Marvell chip.

If you don't want to open this iMac, you'll have to take it to a third part repair shop. Most Apple Stores won't touch this machine because it is in the "Vintage" part of its lifecycle. The only way an Apple Store will work on it is if you bought it in California and are getting it serviced in an Apple Store in California.

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If I do end up opening it up, and I replace the original HDD with a SDD, and then put the HDD in the optical bay (is that even possible?) when will the HDD be slowed down as you said the SDD would?

So weird that this iMac is considered vintage, I remember the first day I got it out of the box makes me feel old.

Intell said:

A hard drive will suffer some slow down on the optical bus, but because hard drives are slow to start with, there will be little noticeable loss. You can only put a laptop sized hard drive where the optical drive is.

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So, booting externally, how much slowdown am I to expect via USB 2.0, Firewire or Ethernet? Unfortunately the iMac only has as high as Firewire 800 but I could go as far as to get a NAS setup with an ethernet connection. I've been searching online for boot times and haven't come up with much yet.

Intell said:

USB 2 and FireWire 400 are slow for external booting, but are workable. FireWire 800 is better, but still suffers from high latency. Ethernet suffers from high latency and CPU limitations for best results. Overall, even booting from the optical bus will provide better speeds than any external drive your iMac can support.

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velocityg4 said:

With a failed internal drive. The computer can be extremely slow booting from the external. As the OS may keep trying to get the internal to mount eating up a lot of CPU cycles.

Most of the time if I try connecting failed hard drives for diagnostics. The Finder can lock up completely for a few minutes then be quite slow. When they are connected while booting the computer will never boot. Until I disconnect the faulty external being tested.

I would recommend just going ahead and replacing the internal drive. If you don't need much storage just replace the drive with a 64GB or 128GB SSD. Then you maximize it's performance.

It made a big difference on my 2006 Macbook when I installed one three years ago. You'll want a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter designed for your iMac. As the cables are offset for 3.5" drives. Standard PC bay adapters are centered since they think you have slack in the cables.

The repair should run between $50 and $100 depending on the size and type of drive you use. Well it can be much higher if you go nuts with it.

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Y'all have convinced me to just go ahead and change it, which is what I was looking forward to doing in the first place. (I like opening stuff up.)

I ordered my ifixit stuff to complete the repair, but I've yet to decide on a HD. I think I'm going to go with the Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB. So I'm going to have to get an adapter for the 3.5 to 2.5 for this '07 24 inch iMac?