Missing HD on imac blueberry

bad news-little green men have stolen your hdd. there is nothing you can do.

in all seriousness, some more background would probably be helpful. for example, what were you doing when you realized the hdd was a goner? do you get a flashing ? on reboot? were you installing a new OS?
reading your post its not entirely clear what you were doing, so any background will help us help you. (ooh, that sounds so smarmy.)

milieu said:

Hi thanks for reply...

The machine was bought for my partners old folks who are new to computing and were told just enough to get them going as time was limited... so im relaying and translating what they've said... apparently they had just finished surfing the web, went to the menu bar and the imac froze... I had told them about force quit which they tried but that didn't work... so they restarted, then the missing system icon appeared, they then tried a whole bunch of key strokes that don't exist, then a circular arrow pointing right and a straight arrow pointing right appeared either side of the sad mac / flashing ? icon although this was not visible when I restarted it. (just the sad mac icon)

I should also mention that some weeks before, in their newbie curiosity! had managed to turn on the ram disk, this I have never used and know nothing about.... on my last visit I tried to turn it off in the memory control panel but couldn't.... ? The imac seemed to be working ok at the time with it, so I left it.

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That sad face with the flashing ? is a bad thing. Your HD is kaput! If you go on eBay you can get another 6 GB drive(or 10 GB if its a slot load iMac) fairly cheap. If you have a tray load blueberry iMac then it will only see the first 7 GB of disk space. I'm not sure about the slot loading iMac but I'm sure its the same way only with it recognizing something like the first 12GB. I'd just get the same size drive that was in it.

mklos is right, the hard drive is busted. sorry dude.


i don't remember, does that imac have usb? could you get a bootable external usb drive for them if you dont want to crack the case?

milieu said:

Yep its got usb.... what do you mean by cracking the case is this what I would have to do to get an internal one in there?

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not literally cracking (you'll have to forgive me, im sick and not thinking totally clearly), but you'd have to open the case up to attach a new internal one, and if you dont want to do that yourself or shell out for an apple-certified repair shop then i believe a usb hard drive is bootable and another option.
anyone more knowledgable then me (and that covers many, many people) speak up if i am innaccurate in the advice i have just dispensed.
good day.

-c

ps its miss fear, not mr fear.

A friend replaced his 10GB internal hard-drive on his slot-loading iMac DV G3 (400MHz I think) with a 40GB hard-drive from my old PC.

I don't think it was very hard.

you don't want to even try running a OS off USB... especially USB 1.1 (what the imac is). I would go buy yourself a harddrive cheap from somewhere like http://www.newegg.com or http://www.macsales.com any IDE ATA Hard Drive will work... you will have to open the thing up, but there are MANY tutorials on how to do this on the net.

Keep in mind that if you are paying more than 80 for an 80GB... its a bad deal.... and that hard drives are universal, the same drive will work in a pc and a mac.

http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Page.cfm?Parent=90&Title=3.5" IDE, ATA, Ultra DMA&Template=

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?description=22-144-122&DEPA=1

question fear said:

mklos is right, the hard drive is busted. sorry dude.


i don't remember, does that imac have usb? could you get a bootable external usb drive for them if you dont want to crack the case?

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All iMac have USB, even the original 233 MHz iMac. If it is a slot load iMac then it also has FireWire on it. Getting into a slot load iMac isn't quite as easy as the tray loading ones, but its not too bad. Look on: http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ and I think they have a take apart instruction manual.

You can also go to:

http://home.earthlink.net/~strahm_s/manuals.html and download the actual Apple Service Manual and that will tell you exactly how to take it apart, what to do and what not to do.

gekko513 said:

A friend replaced his 10GB internal hard-drive on his slot-loading iMac DV G3 (400MHz I think) with a 40GB hard-drive from my old PC.

I don't think it was very hard.

Click to expand...

I'm not sure but if you get a large drive like 80 GB it may not recognize all 80GB's without partitioning it. You may want to look around and see if there is a limitation on the size of hard drive for your version of iMac.

milieu said:

Can someone go into a bit more detail as to why they think it's broke! I would like to understand what happens to a disk when it disappears in this way, then I might be a bit more convinced that I need to go and buy a new one!
It's not that I don't have faith in your knowledge folks

My apologies to you miss fear! that was very assuming of me!
we do all have a tail to shake... so theres no excuse!

Click to expand...

I have seen several Quantum hard drives in this model iMac go bad when a chip on the circuit board (on the bottom of the hard drive) overheats. Often there is even a hole blown in the middle of the chip. I've been able to recover data by finding an identical make/model drive on eBay and swapping the circuit board long enough to copy the data to a new hard drive. I don't trust any Quantum ATA Fireball hard drives in the 10-20GB range anymore. Where I work we've seen about 10 of these drives with the same problem, on Macs and PCs.

I'm not saying that is what happened to your hard drive, but from what you're explaining it does sound like the circuit board on your drive has failed somehow or is not getting power--otherwise the utilities would at least see it.

You can get to the hard drive easily on this iMac. Flip it upside down and remove the bottom case (there are 4 screws), then remove the logic board shield (6 screws), and hard drive is the first drive you see in the bracket near the front of the machine. Remove the RAM modules, disconnect the cables, remove the 4 screws from the hard drive, and it will slide right out.

This machine should accept a new hard drive, and you might also look for a cheap used one. The new 7200RPM drives run hotter than the original drive, and some people say that the lack of a fan in this iMac can cause problems with a new drive...but in reality you should get pretty good life out of it anyway. And the speed increase is definitely noticable.

Best of luck!