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Horizontal progress bar (grey) with a circular loading animation on top of the bar.. Look @ the attached pic.. And YES i did hold the power button! However, why would Disk Utility be telling me then that there's some disk errors? Hold on let me try playing around and trying to turn off the Mac without holding the power button for long..

Maybe because there ARE disk errors?!? :confused::confused::confused:

Honestly, I don't understand why you are skeptical of the HD being defective.
 
Naw, I don't have time to do the Disk Warrior. Changed my mind. I believe they should give me a new iMac when I get to the Apple store, so Disk Warrior is too much hassle and I'm too tired.

DiskWarrior is not for data recovery. It repairs the directory when there is a corrupt or misplaced file. It is used most of the time to help booting issues like this one. I'd give it a shot.
 
Really? Man.. So much hassle required. I just don't have time for playing around with all these little stupid issues. Gosh. I though I'd buy a Mac and get rid of all the extra crap.. As I bought the Mac specifically for web/graphic design, I need a great computer that I don't need to spend time for all this BS.. man.. I'd rather take it to the Genuis Bar than do Disk Warrior now.. :( Oh my gosh, I'm so desperate..

HD failures happen, even with the best/expensive computers. My Dad's company bought some 5K a piece rack mount servers and 2 of the WD hard drives died.
 
Dude you're being no help at all. Disk errors? Wtf? That can mean a whole bunch of various BS. Alright? I don't need your help, thanks.

Maybe because there ARE disk errors?!? :confused::confused::confused:

Honestly, I don't understand why you are skeptical of the HD being defective.
 
Really? Man.. So much hassle required. I just don't have time for playing around with all these little stupid issues. Gosh. I though I'd buy a Mac and get rid of all the extra crap.. As I bought the Mac specifically for web/graphic design, I need a great computer that I don't need to spend time for all this BS.. man.. I'd rather take it to the Genuis Bar than do Disk Warrior now.. :( Oh my gosh, I'm so desperate..

DW only takes about 10 minutes to run. Your experiences, while frustrating (and rightly so), are not typical of Macs in general. It's a sophisticated piece of technology. Of course there will be problems.

Dude you're being no help at all. Disk errors? Wtf? That can mean a whole bunch of various BS. Alright? I don't need your help, thanks.

It could be one of two things. A hardware problem or a software problem. If fsck and DiskWarrior and doing an erase and install of the OS don't work, its the hardware.
 
Yes i know.. My Seagate external HD fell like 2 weeks ago, and bam. Gone. I need to find a data recovery service which is HELLA expensive. Sucks. :( But for the Mac? There should be no reason. It's like a brand new Mac right out of the box. I never punched it, or kicked it or caused any type of damage to it.. haha lol.. So yeah..

HD failures happen, even with the best/expensive computers. My Dad's company bought some 5K a piece rack mount servers and 2 of the WD hard drives died.
 
Dude you're being no help at all. Disk errors? Wtf? That can mean a whole bunch of various BS. Alright? I don't need your help, thanks.

You said Disk Utility is telling you that there are some disk errors. And then you said why Disk Utility would be telling you that. Everyone on the forum suggests that your HD may be defective/not working properly. You refuse to believe it for some unknown reason and is confused why Disk Utility is telling you that in the first place.

How is that so complicated?!?

Yes i know.. My Seagate external HD fell like 2 weeks ago, and bam. Gone. I need to find a data recovery service which is HELLA expensive. Sucks. :( But for the Mac? There should be no reason. It's like a brand new Mac right out of the box. I never punched it, or kicked it or caused any type of damage to it.. haha lol.. So yeah. And this is BS. I gotta uninstall my pirated software :) then give it to AppleCare. This is BS. Hahaa.. Lol.. Why should I be doing all this.. Come on Apple.

Apple DOESN'T manufacture hard drives. It could be defective out of the factory. IDK. You don't need to physically damage electronics to make it not work. It could be defective right out of the box, like the servers' HDs my Dad was setting up for his company.
 
As this one dude mentioned:

You may just have a hard drive with a few bad "sectors", meaning that most of the hard drive is fine, but some parts on the platters on the actual hard drive is bad. So mechanically, it still works. The parts that it tries to write to and read from, is probably why it's having errors.

So if you re-install, it may write to a different sector, appearing to be fine most of the time. But once it starts writing to that bad sector, you'll start to have errors again. I've only had one hard drive like that, so I ended up swapping it out. And this was on a PC by the way, not a Mac.


This convinces me that it's a HARDWARE problem, not software. And reinstalling OS might temporarily fix the issue, but after I access those bad sectors, it'll prob appear again, that error.

DW only takes about 10 minutes to run. Your experiences, while frustrating (and rightly so), are not typical of Macs in general. It's a sophisticated piece of technology. Of course there will be problems.



It could be one of two things. A hardware problem or a software problem. If fsck and DiskWarrior and doing an erase and install of the OS don't work, its the hardware.
 
As this one dude mentioned:

You may just have a hard drive with a few bad "sectors", meaning that most of the hard drive is fine, but some parts on the platters on the actual hard drive is bad. So mechanically, it still works. The parts that it tries to write to and read from, is probably why it's having errors.

So if you re-install, it may write to a different sector, appearing to be fine most of the time. But once it starts writing to that bad sector, you'll start to have errors again. I've only had one hard drive like that, so I ended up swapping it out. And this was on a PC by the way, not a Mac.


This convinces me that it's a HARDWARE problem, not software. And reinstalling OS might temporarily fix the issue, but after I access those bad sectors, it'll prob appear again, that error.

So can you conclude that the HD may be, in fact defective?
 
I think you're misunderstanding me. I said "Why is Disk Utility saying that if the case would be that I held the power button too long"? Firmware update? Has nothing to do with hardware failture. That's what I meant. I believe It's hardware related now. So my HD is defective I guess. And I read on Google some random sites that that error could be solved using fsck, "So if it could be solved, then its again NON HARDWARE RELATED), but that was BS. It didn't work. :(

You said Disk Utility is telling you that there are some disk errors. And then you said why Disk Utility would be telling you that. Everyone on the forum suggests that your HD may be defective/not working properly. You refuse to believe it for some unknown reason and is confused why Disk Utility is telling you that in the first place.

How is that so complicated?!?
 
I think you're misunderstanding me. I said "Why is Disk Utility saying that if the case would be that I held the power button too long"? Firmware update? Has nothing to do with hardware failture. That's what I meant. I believe It's hardware related now. So my HD is defective I guess. And I read on Google some random sites that that error could be solved using fsck, "So if it could be solved, then its again NON HARDWARE RELATED), but that was BS. It didn't work. :(

That doesn't mean that it was BS. It means that it may be hardware related. The error CAN be solved using fsck if that's the problem.
 
I think you're misunderstanding me. I said "Why is Disk Utility saying that if the case would be that I held the power button too long"? Firmware update? Has nothing to do with hardware failture. That's what I meant. I believe It's hardware related now. So my HD is defective I guess. And I read on Google some random sites that that error could be solved using fsck, "So if it could be solved, then its again NON HARDWARE RELATED), but that was BS. It didn't work. :(

Sorry, must have missed the part about holding the power button too long. :p The behavior with the grey Apple logo and the progress bar is consistent with a firmware update. I got that screen a few times when I updated the firmware. However, it should not appear every single time during boot. I don't know why that should appear even if the HD is failing. :confused:
 
A little bit more info about the grey progress bar: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10387698-263.html

Hold on let me try playing around and trying to turn off the Mac without holding the power button for long..
Try not using the power button to turn off your computer. Go to the :apple: icon in the top left and select shut down and when you turn on your computer just tap the power button quickly. The article also mentions the problem appearing after using Boot Camp to install Windows or also if you held down the shift key when starting which you said you have done. I also have XP installed via Boot Camp but I only got the progress bar when I held down the power button. Now that I only quickly tap the power button I haven't had the problem since. From what I've read so far holding down the power button does trigger the firmware update process which does give you this grey progress bar but I'm sure the progress bar is used for other things too. Your problem could be something else though.
 
Solved!

Solved! Went to the Apple store, explained in general terms what the problem was, and they just pulled out a brand new sealed iMac for me, and took the old one. Wow. Definitely I was wrong. Their customer support is more than nice. Sorry Apple. Did a disk check right away, HD is ok! Yey! :D:D:D
 
So next time you want to start yelling at Apple you go to talk to their customer support first, do you?!

Have fun with your way to big all in one screen.
 
New iMac replacement is also defective!

Umm actually maybe I don't regret yelling. Lol. B/c after 1 week of usage after they gave me the new replacement, it seems like this one has a problem also. The screen flickering problem. I'm sure if I take it to the Apple store, THEY'LL HAVE to give me a new one again. For sure. Lots of people got theirs replaced because of this problem. The point is, I installed all my software here, and if I have to exchange again... Looks like many of iMac 27's are affected with this screen flickering issue. And they haven't responded about this yet. They just give out replacements. Some people had to swap 3 times until the third one hasn't flickered.

I just backed everything up in TimeMachine. Gonna take the iMac back to the store and get a second replacement. And hope that one works.

So next time you want to start yelling at Apple you go to talk to their customer support first, do you?!

Have fun with your way to big all in one screen.
 
Just got back from the Apple store. Got another replacement. Haha. It's my 3rd iMac. :D So far everything is cool. No screen flickering. Hope it stays like that :D
 
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