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iMac freezes, HDD clicks

N

Nynte

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 28, 2009
16
0
Hey,

Lately my 27" late 2009 iMac (Quad Core i5) started randomly freezing completely (The entire OS froze without a kernel panic. Pressing the power button for a few seconds was required to shut it down). So far it happened 4 times. In 3 of the times, the bottom right area of the Mac, where the HDD is located, started clicking in a loop as soon as it froze. In the 4th time, I wasn't near by when it happened, so it might have made these noises and eventually stop.

Since one week before the first time it happened I upgraded the RAM, my first suspect was faulty RAM. I booted to Memtest86+ and let it run, and it did find a one bit error almost 9GB into the the address space. I let it run later again for 8 and a half hours, and it found the same bit again, but only once. (Screenshots of Memtest86+ show that if the same bit fails again, it should be listed again. I found it very weird it only failed once in 8 hours, yet it popped relatively early both times I ran it)

However, problems caused by faulty RAM are usually non-deterministic, yet the problem I'm having is the same every time – freezing with HDD clicks. Did anyone ever have this problem before? Could the HDD be defective too?

Thanks!
 
Open Disk Utility, click on the HD and look in the lower part is SMART has passed or not, if it says failing ir failed you need a new HD, backup ASAP.

See screenshot, highlighted in blue.
 

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SMART status seems to be OK (Verified). Thankfully I have a daily backup so I don't have to worry about data loss.
 
Appears to be OK, I guess it's the RAM after all. Thanks!
 
Ok this is an issue I had with my late 2009 iMac. It started about a year ago, I started hearing pops coming out of my Mac where the drive is. Then sometimes the cpu would lock up and I would have to do a hard restart. And during the last 12 months the hard drive has been getting louder and louder of constantly seeking and writing data. Finally beachballing became more frequent and very frustrating during common tasks. Over this time period I ran Disk Utility very often and went through every common trouble shooting issue available and my computer checked out clean. The only thing left was to just do a clean install of mountain lion thinking the OS is maybe corrupted.

Well finally, almost a year later Disk utility is giving me a SMART status failure (even though it operates still) Luckily I still have 3 months left on AppleCare so it's a free replacement but just crazy to think it took almost a year for the drive to break down and how nothing was able to detect what the issue was.
 
My 2010 iMac works great, however every day when i boot up my mac it also makes a clicking noise maybe once or twice before it goes into the desktop. Recently I checked my disks health which checked off as fine, should i be concerned are these early signs that the hard drive is on its way out.
 
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