Is my HD dying?

[Haugiz]

Hi! I have a late 2009 iMac, 3,06GHz C2D, 1 TB HD, 8GB RAM.

A little while ago my HD started acting up. It started showing up as something like EFI-boot in the boot menu (where I chose between bootcamp and OSX). A few days later I couldn't get into OSX without performing some kinda test with a loading bar that took about 5-10 mins each time. Tried to repair the disk in Disk Utility, but was told I had to delete the partition and start over. So I backed up and reinstalled Lion on a new partition, and it's working almost like it should.

Now my HD seems to be making a bit more noise when its working, and it seems to be working a lot more often. It's an annoying grinding sound... And when I'm playing music in iTunes the music sometimes stalls for a few secs if I do basic task on the computer like opening a new window. This does not happen very often, but I can't remember it happening earlier.

Are any of these things symptoms of a dying HD? And is replacing one very expensive?

I was going to sell this one when the 2012 iMac gets here, wouldn't want to sell it with a faulty hd.

Thanks.

 

[rkaufmann87]

Run Apple Hardware Test in Extended Mode and see if it reports any errors, each test will take 30-60 minutes. If no errors are found on the first pass run AHT another 2-3 times to be sure. You can find instructions for AHT in:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509

You can also visit:

http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

This site has sounds recorded of failing and failed HD's, if you hear any of these sounds then that's a pretty good sign the HD is in trouble and needs to be replaced.