iMac hard drive replaced and problems

[jetjaguar]

So I had a 11,1 27" iMac i believe and the hard drive died. Apple wouldn't work on it because it is not longer supported or whatever. I took it to a local repair shop who works on iMacs a lot and he swapped the hard drive for a new 1tb 7200rpm seagate. I picked it up thursday and it was working fine while i tested it out playing games and just general usage.

I decided today to wipe and reinstall OS X before bringing it back to our store where it normally was. And when I booted with command R and went into disk utility I erased the drive and ran first aid on it just to check and it said no issues. When I went ahead with the install and you need to select a drive I couldn't select either.

Ive attached a pic of what it said .. is the drive bad ?? how can I fix this ? I can't call the place until tomorrow about the hard drive.

 

[DeltaMac]

Smart errors, eh?
I suggest that you erase the drive completely, by booting from an external drive. This would be a handy time to have a bootable El Capitan installer on a flash drive - where you can erase all partitions on the hard drive, then reinstall OS X completely clean, which would also replace the recovery partition.
That might clear the SMART errors, as those could be bogus. (at least, you can hope for that!)
Normally, SMART errors should be the notice that it is time to replace your hard drive, but a reformat is a good test to see if those errors disappear. If the SMART errors don't clear, then it's likely that even booting from an external partition will let you do anything to the drive. Disk Utility may simply not allow erasing, or re-partitioning, but worth trying, I think.
Or, maybe you just got a bum Seagate hard drive (which wouldn't be a great surprise either )
"New" does not necessarily mean "Good", but can also give you a clue why Seagate drives are often at the bottom end of the price range. Sometimes, you DO get what you pay for

Or, you can stop where you are, call the shop, and tell them it stopped booting, and the hard drive is now giving you SMART errors.
I would be curious about what they will say?

 

[jetjaguar]

Smart errors, eh?
I suggest that you erase the drive completely, by booting from an external drive. This would be a handy time to have a bootable El Capitan installer on a flash drive - where you can erase all partitions on the hard drive, then reinstall OS X completely clean, which would also replace the recovery partition.
That might clear the SMART errors, as those could be bogus. (at least, you can hope for that!)
Normally, SMART errors should be the notice that it is time to replace your hard drive, but a reformat is a good test to see if those errors disappear. If the SMART errors don't clear, then it's likely that even booting from an external partition will let you do anything to the drive. Disk Utility may simply not allow erasing, or re-partitioning, but worth trying, I think.
Or, maybe you just got a bum Seagate hard drive (which wouldn't be a great surprise either )
"New" does not necessarily mean "Good", but can also give you a clue why Seagate drives are often at the bottom end of the price range. Sometimes, you DO get what you pay for

Or, you can stop where you are, call the shop, and tell them it stopped booting, and the hard drive is now giving you SMART errors.
I would be curious about what they will say?

I can boot into disk utility and erase the drive .. i haven't tried to repartition it though .. maybe ill hold off and call tomorrow morning and see what they say.

How do I create a bootable usb for el captain so i can try and fix it that way ?


It is just weird that it worked and booted perfectly fine for 3 days and then when i go to reinstall the OS this happens

 

[DeltaMac]

Your main issue right now is the SMART errors, which MAY mean that the hard drive is no good.

It is a common task here to make a bootable installer for El Cap (and four OS X versions prior to El Cap, which have similar steps to follow).
There are instructions to "create bootable El Capitan flash drive", either from the terminal, or use one of the apps that you can download that are made to do that task.
A good one is DiskMakerX.
You will need the El Capitan installer app, which you may already have saved somewhere, or you can download it again from the App Store.

 

[jetjaguar]

created the usb disk and still no go .. maybe I'm not doing something right. Called the place and the guy said to create a usb drive and do it that way. No matter if I delete the partition etc .. still getting the same error message. Only drive they will let me install to is the usb one

 

[roberthallin]

Are you holding down the option key and booting from the USB-drive? You shouldn't be able to install to the USB-drive if you are, assuming it's a drive with one partition on it.

 

[jetjaguar]

I boot with the usb drive in. I hold option and select the usb drive. It brings up the Mac utilities thing and I go to install and it shows the usb drive and the hard drive but the hard drive can't be selexted
[doublepost=1457973872][/doublepost]Nvm trying to install now
[doublepost=1457974166][/doublepost]After it goes thru the initial boot off the usb it comes to the mac utility menu and when I go to install I get this

 

[DeltaMac]

The hard drive is not working properly.
It reports SMART errors - which might be bogus, but the errors prevent you from installing OS X, and that message that you get tells you exactly that, and what to do next (replace the hard drive)
Hard drives can fail - even when new. There's a warranty from Seagate, so you can get a replacement directly from Seagate - but I think it would be better to go through the service shop that already helped you.

Be sure to suggest to the shop that they should try replacing the SATA cable, too.

 

[jetjaguar]

the shop said they don't see why there is a problem because it left with no issues .. so looks like I'm on my own .. i guess i can attempt to pull the drive out myself and send it back to seagate for a replacement

 

[BrianBaughn]

If you supplied the drive I can understand the shop's point of view. If they supplied it, then they ought to replace it.

 

[DeltaMac]

the shop said they don't see why there is a problem because it left with no issues .. so looks like I'm on my own .. i guess i can attempt to pull the drive out myself and send it back to seagate for a replacement

Except - the shop will have the tools needed. The drive worked only since Thursday, then (apparently) failed when you tried to restore your own software on the drive.
You got a bad drive. Why not give the shop the opportunity to help you out?

Unless you just don't want to do business with that shop now... And that's OK, too...

So, what's your plan if the drive is not really the problem (and it is a faulty SATA cable?)

 

[jetjaguar]

I have the things to remove the screen coming from owc .. If I have to I will get a data cable.

When I called the shop he really didn't want to deal with it. I mean he was like I installed the drive and loaded El Capitan and it worked fine.

 

[BrianBaughn]

I think it's great that you're going to crack that thing open yourself. I would suggest you swap the optical drive out for the large spinner HD (that I'm presuming you're putting in) and get an SSD for your system HD.