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Lion apparently may have caused issues on my 2009 iMac 27" Corei7 2.8 ghz

aliensporebomb

aliensporebomb

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jun 19, 2005
1,912
332
Minneapolis, MN, USA, Urth
Circumstantial I know.

CPU:
2009 iMac Corei7 2.8 ghz - 16 Gigs Ram - 1 TB internal drive + multiple externals.

Caveats:
(1) I'm aware of the hard drive recall affecting certain imacs. I checked the serial of the drive and it was not part of the recall.

(2) I still have Applecare coverage for the machine for another year, I will be contacting them first thing tomorrow.

(3) The fact that the machine was flawless up until Lion was installed (<9 days ago) may be circumstantial but it may be evidence of problems with that OS.

(4) Hard drives are mechanical and can fail at any time for any reason.

What happened today:
I started a thread in the Lion OS sub-board mentioning certain applications were taking longer and longer to launch - preview for example.

Shortly after this I saw another thread where someone mentioned when they saw this discussed repairing disc permissions.

Disk Utility couldn't repair them when booting off of a bootable CD. I did manage to get the drive to mount for a time and was able to back up some items I was hoping to keep that were too new to be backed up by time machine and then shortly after that it wouldn't mount anymore. The error
basically indicated that I had to back up all data, reformat and reinstall the OS. S.M.A.R.T. status indicated verified so it didn't think the drive was dying
but I've seen dying drives on the PC side before indicate S.M.A.R.T. verified just before they died abruptly.

What next:
I've tried booting off of my self-made Lion boot disc to try and reformat the internal drive to start completely over but now the machine is giving me a gray blank screen at boot and even if I attempt to force boot off of the CD or an external Firewire 800 drive neither makes any difference.

I just get a featureless gray screen. I'll probably zap the pram next and if that fails I might just leave it until I can drag it over to Apple tomorrow sometime.

So, caveat emptor, etc.
 
Last edited:
Software cannot kill hardware. You were just unlucky but luckily you were able to backup most of the files and are also under AppleCare.
 
Don't be too certain

Software can lead to running hotter temperatures (as has been indicated on several threads on this very board) which can cause premature hardware failures.

I did manage to get the computer to boot after several hours of sitting off. I tried to format the internal drive but it failed partway thru.

I tried again and it worked but I don't trust the drive at all. Off to the apple store after work this eve most likely.
 
Your hard drive was probably already failing, you just didn't know it. Installing a new OS requires a lot of writing to the hard drive, and in the case of Lion, repartitioning for the new recovery partition. All of this just hastened your already doomed drive's departure.

The claim that "Lion apparently killed my 2009 iMac 27" Corei7 2.8 ghz" is deceptively sensationalistic. It was only your hard drive that died, and Lion had nothing to do with it.
 
aliensporebomb said:
Software can lead to running hotter temperatures (as has been indicated on several threads on this very board) which can cause premature hardware failures.
Click to expand...

It's not very valid to draw the conclusion that heat caused this or anything else. Yes, heat is never good, but it's very unlikely that it is the sole reason. If it was, then all iMacs would fail within the same period since heat affects them universally.

This was a regular HD failure and most likely would have happened in Snow Leopard sooner than later.
 
Darth.Titan said:
Your hard drive was probably already failing, you just didn't know it. Installing a new OS requires a lot of writing to the hard drive, and in the case of Lion, repartitioning for the new recovery partition. All of this just hastened your already doomed drive's departure.

The claim that "Lion apparently killed my 2009 iMac 27" Corei7 2.8 ghz" is deceptively sensationalistic. It was only your hard drive that died, and Lion had nothing to do with it.
Click to expand...

Darth Titan is totally right here, theres no way Lions going to cause hardware failure. I'm not saying the OP is a liar or anything as your obviously having issues, but it sounds like a bad hard drive etc etc. Take it to the Apple Store to have it checked out
 
I'm pretty sure it's the drive but it could be the CPU too...

If I try to boot off my self-made Lion DVD I get the opportunity to format the internal drive which I do.

Then I tell it to install Lion and the following happens;

I get "checking all discs" then it hangs as long as you care to let it go. Installer log says it sees my external drives then seems to just fail out.

It's not hung up, it just doesn't seem to be doing anything after that.
 
Darth.Titan said:
Your hard drive was probably already failing, you just didn't know it. Installing a new OS requires a lot of writing to the hard drive, and in the case of Lion, repartitioning for the new recovery partition. All of this just hastened your already doomed drive's departure.

The claim that "Lion apparently killed my 2009 iMac 27" Corei7 2.8 ghz" is deceptively sensationalistic. It was only your hard drive that died, and Lion had nothing to do with it.
Click to expand...

Yup. That's exactly what I was about to post.
 
Update.

CPU is back. They did not replace hard drive. Machine blue screened ala Windows on their workbench. They had to take in back for some five finger death punch treatment that took about 40 minutes. More in the morning.
 
Update

When I booted the machine, it had 10.68 on it and iLife 09.

The first thing it asks is if it can copy data from an existing drive so I told it to back up the data from my Lion external boot drive to my internal.

That took about seven hours.

Everything appears to be functioning finally. Except - since my external boot drive is set up on Lion some parts of iLife won't work. iTunes won't work.

I figure I would just update my system to Lion again and get it over with but it produces an error:

ALERT:

This computer cannot run OS 10.7.


And you click OK and you exit back to the finder.

@#!#!@$

I might have to wipe it and start clean from scratch but the little Apple "hey, let me copy data from another drive to your main drive" is seriously flawed then.
 
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