Horrible clicking noise in iMac G5

[ProstheticHead]

Yeah, so this morning I woke up and awoke my iMac from sleep only to have it make a horrible clicking noise multiple times and stay frozen on the desktop screen. I restarted it and made it spit out my Lord of the Rings DVD, held down the option key and brought it to the boot menu. Started it up from there and it is running fine, no clicking.

Should I be concerned about that horrible click?

 

[tsd]

I suppose that depends. If it was your Hard Drive clicking, be very afraid, and back everything up immediately if not sooner. You said it ejected a DVD? Was it just the disc making a weird sound while spinning? Sometimes slot-loading drives can sound pretty awful with certain discs.

 

[ProstheticHead]

I suppose that depends. If it was your Hard Drive clicking, be very afraid, and back everything up immediately if not sooner. You said it ejected a DVD? Was it just the disc making a weird sound while spinning? Sometimes slot-loading drives can sound pretty awful with certain discs.

Out of pure paranoia I've just backed up all my documents, photos, etc so that in the case that the HD was making the terrible click, I'll be prepared. It hasn't made any noises since I ejected the DVD, so I'm hoping it was just the slot load drive acting up. I'm going to try restarting the computer after my back-up disc is complete and hope for the best.

It's running Leopard right now, and I recall reading that Leopard sent out the click of death to some hard drives, should I be even more paranoid and down-grade to Tiger?

 

[ProstheticHead]

Thank god I backed everything up...

This morning, my iMac would not start up past the white screen displaying the grey apple. It would shut down automatically after kicking the fans to insanely high rpm's. I ran the hardware test and found that the hard drive had corrupted itself. I've just re-installed Tiger (screw Leopard) and am going to test if it still refuses to start up once I restart it this time.

In the unfortunate case that I have to replace the hard drive, any body have experience tearing open an iMac to replace the drive? I refuse to pay stupidly expensive tech fees when I can get some advice and do it myself.

 

[AGSHender]

Out of pure paranoia I've just backed up all my documents, photos, etc so that in the case that the HD was making the terrible click, I'll be prepared. It hasn't made any noises since I ejected the DVD, so I'm hoping it was just the slot load drive acting up. I'm going to try restarting the computer after my back-up disc is complete and hope for the best.

It's running Leopard right now, and I recall reading that Leopard sent out the click of death to some hard drives, should I be even more paranoid and down-grade to Tiger?

Leopard didn't send the click of death to drives, it was rather an issue with certain Macs that shipped with a specific type of drive. The OS was immaterial.

https://www.macrumors.com/2007/11/26/apple-acknowledges-reports-of-macbook-hard-drive-failures/

 

[ProstheticHead]

Leopard didn't send the click of death to drives, it was rather an issue with certain Macs that shipped with a specific type of drive. The OS was immaterial.

https://www.macrumors.com/2007/11/26/apple-acknowledges-reports-of-macbook-hard-drive-failures/

I call shenanigans on this. There seems to be an unusual amount of drives crapping put recently in these forums. I just picked up a new drive for it today, just have to figure how to get the damned bezel off to perform surgery!

 

[AGSHender]

I call shenanigans on this. There seems to be an unusual amount of drives crapping put recently in these forums. I just picked up a new drive for it today, just have to figure how to get the damned bezel off to perform surgery!

Drives crap out, it's a fact of life. As an admin of 70-odd Dell servers and workstations now and 200-odd Dell servers and workstations before this, I am completely willing to testify that hard drives crap out far too often. As a former owner of one of the (luckily not defective) IBM Deathstar hard drives, I can testify that manufacturing defects for specific models exist and break drives.

I haven't heard or read anything more than your vague claim, however, so I can neither confirm nor deny anything about a specific complaint you may have. In fact, I'm not even aware of any way an operating system could brick a hard drive. Until I see something more than "Well, that one guy and that other guy said...." it's pretty much just anecdotal evidence of something more than regular or previously-recognized hardware failures. I'm not claiming there's nothing there, just that I haven't seen any level of failure you're referring to to indicate something systematic.

 

[ProstheticHead]

I haven't heard or read anything more than your vague claim, however, so I can neither confirm nor deny anything about a specific complaint you may have. In fact, I'm not even aware of any way an operating system could brick a hard drive. Until I see something more than "Well, that one guy and that other guy said...." it's pretty much just anecdotal evidence of something more than regular or previously-recognized hardware failures. I'm not claiming there's nothing there, just that I haven't seen any level of failure you're referring to to indicate something systematic.

I can dream of conspiracy theories can't I? My drive may have been taken from me, but they can never take my imagination!

 

[ProstheticHead]

Final Update

So I managed to get the iMac opened up and replace my HD, re-install everything, etc.

My advice for anyone looking to perform a similar operation:

If you've got the cash, go to the Apple store.

If you don't have the cash, find a patient friend who can help you.

If you're a starving student and have a decent amount of experience with the insides of a computer, go right ahead. This is the ONLY case in which you should do this. It is not fun and is terribly annoying.