Partiton of 500g hard drive

[jo498]

I'am trying to do a clean install of OS 10(snow leopard) on a 21" Imac.It has been formatting for 24 hours is that normal, or is the hard drive dead.Should i stop it.

 

[old-wiz]

what kind of format? Usually initializing a drive takes only a minute. How are you formatting it?

 

[Weaselboy]

I'am trying to do a clean install of OS 10(snow leopard) on a 21" Imac.It has been formatting for 24 hours is that normal, or is the hard drive dead.Should i stop it.

Definitely not normal. You should be able to format that disk in about a minute as old-wiz says.

Was this disk working properly before you attempted the reinstall?

Try to boot again from the SL DVD and run a repair disk from Disk Util.

 

[jo498]

The (first aid tab) in Disk Utility is not highlighted, i can not click the tab. Also when the imac was working ( Finder) would lock up and desktop icon were lost until i rebooted the mac , this happened a few times it's a 2010 imac ( Do you think it's the motherboard over heating or hard Drive or battery)

P.S. I also duel booted with windows7 for a while then i removed windows

 

[Weaselboy]

The (first aid tab) in Disk Utility is not highlighted, i can not click the tab. Also when the imac was working ( Finder) would lock up and desktop icon were lost until i rebooted the mac , this happened a few times it's a 2010 imac ( Do you think it's the motherboard over heating or hard Drive or battery)

P.S. I also duel booted with windows7 for a while then i removed windows

Hmmm.. that is not good. It sounds like the drive won't even mount.

Battery would not cause this and the fact you can run off the DVD points away from the main motherboard. Your previous symptoms and now this point to a bad drive.

 

[jo498]

Hmmm.. that is not good. It sounds like the drive won't even mount.

Battery would not cause this and the fact you can run off the DVD points away from the main motherboard. Your previous symptoms and now this point to a bad drive.

I just run disk utility (repair disk )here is return massage the bold part was in red lettering then after repair was done . A pop-up window gave me an option to reformat hard drive.

verify an repair volume "disk0s2:
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions. for the volume as required.
last message was in red Error : Disk Utility can't repair this disk... disk, and restore your back backed-up files.

 

[Weaselboy]

I just run disk utility (repair disk )here is return massage the bold part was in red lettering then after repair was done . A pop-up window gave me an option to reformat hard drive.

verify an repair volume "disk0s2:
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions. for the volume as required.
last message was in red Error : Disk Utility can't repair this disk... disk, and restore your back backed-up files.

I thought you could not see the drive in DU... now you can and you got a repair disk to run?

Assuming you have your data backed up, nothing to lose at this point by trying the format again. After the format run disk repair again and see if you get errors.

I'm still thinking your drive is about to take a dirt nap though. 🙁

 

[jo498]

I just run disk utility (repair disk )here is return massage the bold part was in red lettering then after repair was done . A pop-up window gave me an option to reformat hard drive.

verify an repair volume "disk0s2:
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions. for the volume as required.
last message was in red Error : Disk Utility can't repair this disk... disk, and restore your back backed-up files.

From the Mac install dvd (System Profiler) ---> Serial -ATA I can still see information about my hard drive in the serial ATA device tree
Do you think the drive is bad ?

 

[Weaselboy]

From the Mac install dvd (System Profiler) ---> Serial -ATA I can still see information about my hard drive in the serial ATA device tree
Do you think the drive is bad ?

From your description so far, yes.