Sic imac

[shunn]

Hello i have an iMac 27 late 2009 i5 with ati 4850 gpu broken faulty superdrive and snow leopard.i also have a bootcamp partition with win7 and refit.
I first encountered problems when watching flash video.The video and mac froze and the sound continued only leaving me with the option of holding the power button down to power off.When i booted up again there was a loading bar under the apple logo but it booted into osx without any problems until the same problem popped up a few more times all the time when watching flash video.Eventually i could not boot at all getting little grey blocks on a white background just after the apple logo.After a few attempts it booted up again and fearing for my gpu i installed smc fan control took the mac to pieces to clean all the fans.i also uninstalled refit,repaired permissions and reset pram and the smc.It was ok for a couple of days until the problem came back and would boot successfully less and less apart from in safe mode.I wanted to reinstall snow leopard but my superdrive just whirred and spat out the disk so i installed mavericks.This again worked for a couple of days with frequent beach balls before getting worse eventually turning its self off after the apple logo refusing to even boot into safe mode.It would however boot into recovery mode where i tried a disk repair with this message "Disk utility can't repair disk! Disk utility stopped working back up as many of your files as possible,reformat the disk and restore your backed up files".I formatted the bootcamp partition and reinstalled mavericks with a few graphics glitches and freezes in the install but I'm booting up for now.Im really hoping i have a hard drive problem its not the video card.Any help would be much appreciated thanks!

 

[macthefork]

Sounds like the Hard Drive is failing. Apple had a recall on the Seagate drives a while back. Although, it may be expired. You can see if your iMac falls under this recall, and call Apple if it does. The have a wide leeway to still perform this repair under certain circumstances.

Otherwise, you may need to install a new HDD yourself.

 

[thedeske]

Otherwise, you may need to install a new HDD yourself.

And if you're going to open it up, you have a great excuse to install an SSD in the broken DVD slot. Worth the trouble.

 

[shunn]

Thanks very much for the replies but unfortunately i don't qualify for the recall.If it were my hard drive why would watching flash video cause the crashes.

 

[shunn]

Here are the kind of freezes i get.This was on the mavericks install.Fortunately i was cooking at the time and it sorted its self out by time i came back to it enabling me to complete the installation but sometimes just hangs like this unable to boot at all.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Looks more like a video card failure. Then you are out of luck if that is the case.

 

[shunn]

Ok it booted up again and i have the fans cranked up with smc fan control.There was one instance where after coming out of sleep mode smc did not kick in and it crashed watching flash video refusing to boot at all for a couple of days but with the fans has been ok for a week or so.I know there is something wrong most probably thermal related.i certainly do not want to have my fans running full tilt.