Help, Hard Drive Hosed

[Wyvernspirit]

Not sure where to put this or what to do.

When I got home from work this afternoon my iMac was having some trouble waking from sleep, ended up rebooting. That was fine, and it started to work, albeit slowly, but searchlight was performing an update or something and figured it was the issue. Suddenly everything just stopped. Had to reboot again. Now it jumps to my secondary, snow leopard, drive and my lion drive is no where to be seen. Disk utility sees it and I try to fix the disk. After 5 minutes it says that it is unrecoverable and needs to be reformatted. but even after 5 restarts, into Sow leopard on hard disk, snow leopard on DVD, and the lion HD recovery disk on flash drive, disk utility wont let me reformat or repartition or even check the disk, everything is grayed out.

What should I do now, I do have a few ideas, but what to step back take a breath and see what others might think?

 

[benthewraith]

Not sure where to put this or what to do.

When I got home from work this afternoon my iMac was having some trouble waking from sleep, ended up rebooting. That was fine, and it started to work, albeit slowly, but searchlight was performing an update or something and figured it was the issue. Suddenly everything just stopped. Had to reboot again. Now it jumps to my secondary, snow leopard, drive and my lion drive is no where to be seen. Disk utility sees it and I try to fix the disk. After 5 minutes it says that it is unrecoverable and needs to be reformatted. but even after 5 restarts, into Sow leopard on hard disk, snow leopard on DVD, and the lion HD recovery disk on flash drive, disk utility wont let me reformat or repartition or even check the disk, everything is grayed out.

What should I do now, I do have a few ideas, but what to step back take a breath and see what others might think?

Do you have two partitions or two physical hard drives? Sounds like the hard drive Lion is installed on is dead. If it's two partitions, you can bet that your SL will soon be having problems. You can either take it to Apple for them to replace the hard drive for free (assuming it's still covered by AppleCare), or you can purchase an SSD and install it yourself, with your best bet being Intel and OCZ. Or you can just purchase a conventional 7200 rpm hard drive.

 

[Wyvernspirit]

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The secondary hard drive is an external FireWire 800 drive. The iMac is several years old now (2008?) and no longer under warranty and changing the internal hard drive on an iMac is not for the feint of heart, I also don't have the right tools to remove the glass.

 

[mainstay]

Can you use a program like disk drill to see what the smart values are reporting?

Any audible clicking or knocking sounds?

The 2008 iMac is MUCH easier to replace the HD on than the earlier editions.

Little suction cups pop the glass out (I actually left my high quality suction cups at a job site and used my toddlers high-chair toys' suction cups and it worked just fine).

But, to be sure, if you don't feel comfortable replacing the drive yourself, take it to a local repair shop.

 

[Wyvernspirit]

Can't seem to get any S.M.A.R.T. Data but not sure about diskdrill, it shows the drive as an unpartitioned drive.

 

[mainstay]

if it contains information you don't want to lose, I'd take it to someone who can recover it.

if it doesn't contain vital information, then replace the drive.

if you don't feel comfortable doing it yourself, then take it to a shop.

 

[Wyvernspirit]

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Took it to a shop had them install a 500Gb drive in it, so at least it's an "upgrade" wish I could have afforded a decent sized solid state.

 

[Wyvernspirit]

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This gives me a chance to use the migration assistant from time machine.

I already got to use my recovery flash drive, which realy was needed in this case. It worked but took 4 hours to install lion.

 

[mainstay]

Glad you got a new drive in the machine and you are up and running.

Did they offer any insight into the health of your old drive? Did they take a look at salvaging files?

If you are finished with that drive and are going to recycling it, destroy it with a hammer first. Someone with time, skill, and bad intentions can still likely pull data off of it.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

This gives me a chance to use the migration assistant from time machine.

I already got to use my recovery flash drive, which realy was needed in this case. It worked but took 4 hours to install lion.

That is good - and bad - at the same time.

4 hours is such a waste and I wish Apple would provide a disc with lion. I am not about to waste $70 on a flash drive. Apple actually promised me a disc with Lion before it was released... but then had no record of such promise once the official "no disc" policy came out.

Of course I've made my non-supported DVD, but still, it seems pretty sketchy when you are walking around with a burned copy with a sharpie label of "Lion Reinstall".

Cheers mate!

--m

 

[Wyvernspirit]

Glad you got a new drive in the machine and you are up and running.

Did they offer any insight into the health of your old drive? Did they take a look at salvaging files?

If you are finished with that drive and are going to recycling it, destroy it with a hammer first. Someone with time, skill, and bad intentions can still likely pull data off of it.

I didn't want them to touch any files, just take out the drive install the new. I was planning on doing everything else myself. I have the old drive and may try working on it now that is free of the iMac.

The drive I got (500Gb Seagate barracuda) is sold on newegg for more then the cost of my installation, although I did find it cheaper elsewhere, it made me not feel so bad.

That is good - and bad - at the same time.

4 hours is such a waste and I wish Apple would provide a disc with lion. I am not about to waste $70 on a flash drive. Apple actually promised me a disc with Lion before it was released... but then had no record of such promise once the official "no disc" policy came out.

Of course I've made my non-supported DVD, but still, it seems pretty sketchy when you are walking around with a burned copy with a sharpie label of "Lion Reinstall".

Cheers mate!

--m

Actually after the MA was complete the iMac would boot again (let it try for about an hour) and had to boot up into the recovery hd again. Disk utility said all was good, so I reinstalled lion on top of the install, another 4 hours, and finally I was back to about 90% of where I was before all this.

Had to use Software Update to re-update iTunes and a few others and then The Mac App store to re-download several apps including iPhoto and Xcode to get up to around 95%. I am going to wait on a few missing items as I am not sure they are needed and think I may live without them.

Thanks all who tried to help. Wish I hadn't had to pay money to get it working but at least I have a working mac again.

 

[Morod]

Was the original HD that failed a 360GB Hitachi by chance?
I ask because mine failed with about a month of AppleCare coverage left. The Apple Store upgraded my HD to a 500GB Intel for no charge. Nice of them. I have a late 2007 Al iMac, 2.4GHz.

 

[Wyvernspirit]

Was the original HD that failed a 360GB Hitachi by chance?
I ask because mine failed with about a month of AppleCare coverage left. The Apple Store upgraded my HD to a 500GB Intel for no charge. Nice of them. I have a late 2007 Al iMac, 2.4GHz.

No, a WD 320, if I had purchased AppleCare Like wanted to this computer would still be covered.