iMac just hangs, what happened?

[thewright1]

Hi All,

I ran into an issue out of the blue yesterday. All of sudden, my iMac started hanging up on me. It started getting really slow and whatever i click, seemed like it would take forever to load. The spinning wheel would happen for about 30 seconds, then the app would open up. Larger apps (photoshop, etc.) would take a little longer. I tried running disk repair (which took all night to run) next morning, when I restarted, same thing, it hung. I tried running in safe mode, but nothing, just the apple loading screen. I read somewhere to try cmd + option + p + r to reset the pram, but still nothing. I thought maybe it could be the ram, so i replaced it with my back up ram but same thing. I'm out of ideas, anything?

 

[wrinkster22]

you probably need more ram. How much do you have?
8gb can be found for 35 $ now

 

[thewright1]

you probably need more ram. How much do you have?
8gb can be found for 35 $ now

I have 4GB of ram right now and everything was working fine the day before then all of sudden it just crapped out. Is that pretty normal behavior for low ram? Another update. I tried restarting the computer and now it's just stuck at the apple loading screen.

 

[thewright1]

HD might be dead

So my final straw was to just restore one of my latest backups and i noticed my Macintosh HD didn't show up on the "select a destination disk" screen. I then just decided to re-install a new version of Lion and again, my Macintosh HD didn't show up. So I'm inclined to think my HD is dead. Does that sound about right?

 

[thewright1]

Another update, I read somewhere that you should first erase the disk before trying to restore so i went back into disk utilities and attempted to restore which at that point, i did find my untitled hard drive that was just erased. I selected it and now it's restoring. I'll get back to you all and let you know how it turned out.

 

[MrXiro]

Another update, I read somewhere that you should first erase the disk before trying to restore so i went back into disk utilities and attempted to restore which at that point, i did find my untitled hard drive that was just erased. I selected it and now it's restoring. I'll get back to you all and let you know how it turned out.

I literally just took my iMac to to the apple store for this issue and a smudged LCD panel. The genius claimed it was just a header issue on my iMac. He did a disk repair and verification. He said it should be good now. Won't know for sure til I get my iMac back tomorrow.

 

[thewright1]

The disk repair/verification didn't work for me for some reason. I ran it twice just incase but no dice. Erasing the drive completely and then recovering from my time machine back up did it for me. Thanks everyone for your input.