Yesterday I downloaded and installed two updates, migration assist whatever and airport extreme something-004. After booting my comp went sluggish, but because it was late I thought nothing of it and shutdown the computer. That is something I never do, I've had my iMac for a year and it was the biggest break ever for this. I don't use sleep either.
So next morning I fired up my computer and faced a disaster, my computer doesn't boot, it can't find any bootable partitions. After numerous boots it did find the partitions, but wouldn't still load. Even did alt+cmd+r+p to reset pram and nvram, without any help. Some hour and lots of coffee later I somehow got it to load windows, which really didn't make any sense to me, but I was happy. Oh, and at some point I changed the ram since I had my old ones still wasting space in the closet, which didn't help (changed them back sometime ago after getting windows to boot up)
In windows I downloaded HDDScan to investigate. Did read test to sweep the whole disk. Here things got interesting, as shown in this screenshot, most of the blocks should be at less than 5ms, almoust all of mine were somewhere at 50-500ms. Doesn't bode well for the hd. BUT, none were bad, from the ones I got to see, and smart said everything was ok. Since the test was taking really long, I went to eat, when I came back I saw that the windows had crashed and my computer booted in to os x(!). Here I started to investigate and used disk utility to verify disk, which output this.
Since verify failed and I couldn't repair it either way I booted my leopard dvd, and opened disk utility for repairs, this took a few tries because it didn't want to find my hdd, but I eventually got it. Now here when I try to verify it always crashes at some point, during the start of the disk, just gives me the beach ball rolling around without anything else happening. Or if I just hit repair it takes it sweet time and then says "Could not unmount partition" or something like that.. And I can't always even get to load the install dvd, hangs up with the cursor showing, when the different boot options should become visible.
I can not partition it again, since it doesn't unmount. I can not archive and install os x again, it always just hangs at the beginning of the install. I haven't been able to boot in to os x again after that one lucky time. I CAN boot in to windows which resides at the end of the hdd, although this takes some tries, since at boot it still doesn't always find my partitions.
One interesting shot of what I got two or three times while trying to boot.
I'm quite sure now that my hdd is broken. Warranty for my iMac ended a month ago, but by law I can still get this fixed, but it isn't that easy anymore, way too many phone calls etc. I figured I'll just swap a new hdd in and try if it works, if it doesn't I'll start the war with apple. (nothing in this to tell if I've opened it or not)
So, now I'm asking you if you know it's something else than my hdd, speak up please, before I do something wrong
Oh, and are there any limitations on what hdd to get as long as it is sata? I was thinking of 640GB WD Caviar SE16.
So next morning I fired up my computer and faced a disaster, my computer doesn't boot, it can't find any bootable partitions. After numerous boots it did find the partitions, but wouldn't still load. Even did alt+cmd+r+p to reset pram and nvram, without any help. Some hour and lots of coffee later I somehow got it to load windows, which really didn't make any sense to me, but I was happy. Oh, and at some point I changed the ram since I had my old ones still wasting space in the closet, which didn't help (changed them back sometime ago after getting windows to boot up)
In windows I downloaded HDDScan to investigate. Did read test to sweep the whole disk. Here things got interesting, as shown in this screenshot, most of the blocks should be at less than 5ms, almoust all of mine were somewhere at 50-500ms. Doesn't bode well for the hd. BUT, none were bad, from the ones I got to see, and smart said everything was ok. Since the test was taking really long, I went to eat, when I came back I saw that the windows had crashed and my computer booted in to os x(!). Here I started to investigate and used disk utility to verify disk, which output this.
Since verify failed and I couldn't repair it either way I booted my leopard dvd, and opened disk utility for repairs, this took a few tries because it didn't want to find my hdd, but I eventually got it. Now here when I try to verify it always crashes at some point, during the start of the disk, just gives me the beach ball rolling around without anything else happening. Or if I just hit repair it takes it sweet time and then says "Could not unmount partition" or something like that.. And I can't always even get to load the install dvd, hangs up with the cursor showing, when the different boot options should become visible.
I can not partition it again, since it doesn't unmount. I can not archive and install os x again, it always just hangs at the beginning of the install. I haven't been able to boot in to os x again after that one lucky time. I CAN boot in to windows which resides at the end of the hdd, although this takes some tries, since at boot it still doesn't always find my partitions.
One interesting shot of what I got two or three times while trying to boot.
I'm quite sure now that my hdd is broken. Warranty for my iMac ended a month ago, but by law I can still get this fixed, but it isn't that easy anymore, way too many phone calls etc. I figured I'll just swap a new hdd in and try if it works, if it doesn't I'll start the war with apple. (nothing in this to tell if I've opened it or not)
So, now I'm asking you if you know it's something else than my hdd, speak up please, before I do something wrong
Oh, and are there any limitations on what hdd to get as long as it is sata? I was thinking of 640GB WD Caviar SE16.