Intel iMac Internal HD issues.

B

Bushwack

Registered
Hello all, I am a die hard mac user, (proud owner of 5 of them ) recently a friend of mine came to me with an issue, his Computer would not boot up, when it finally did it took over an hour, I brought it to my house, and backed up all of the data on his hard drive. I the used disk utility to check the disk, it was fine. So I figured I would start from scratch and install a fresh copy of 10.4.7... I began the erase disk procedure.
Well I live in Southern California and folks cant drive around here, someone took out a transformer in the middle of the erase....power outage for 3 hours. I went to continue the procedure and now I get input output errors, I can't do anything with the drive...I lost the partition and everything. IS the drive hosed or is there another way to fix this?

Please help... anyone in my Location with the answer gets a gift card for free beer......LOL
 
Try creating a brand-new partition on the drive (not just trying to format the existing partition).

Do this by selecting the hard drive (not the indented volume listing below the hard drive device) in the left-hand sidebar of Disk Utility. Click the "Partition" pane, select your partition scheme (and check the "Advanced" options to make sure you're using the correct partition map), and then partition the drive fresh. Try installing on the new partition.
 
Thanks for the quick reply, I have tried that, I get a "input output error after several minutes of waiting. I have also tried to "zero data" and I get the same error. The drive shows up in the window, but when I click I can't verify or repair disk, the buttons are gray'd out.
Thanks for your help
 
Sounds like something really got screwed with the hard drive. If you have another computer (maybe even a Windows computer) around, try taking the hard drive out of the Mac, putting it into another computer (or an external USB case, etc.) and format it with a Windows machine (or, another Mac) and see if you can't get a good format out of it.

If so, then plop it back in the original Mac and try the repartition dance over.
 
I really hate to break open the Imac, I am no tech guru. I work with my hands but with much bigger machines. LOL
No other way huh? Dang, Well how about some S.O.P on it? a standard operating procedure a step by step instruction manual?
 
You could also try starting the iMac up in Target Disk Mode (hold 't' while the machine boots until you see a firewire icon on the screen) while connected to another Mac via FireWire, and then try and partition the drive that way.

In this mode, the iMac should appear to the "host" Mac as any other external FireWire hard drive would.
 
Would that be the same as starting it up with an external HD? I did that, and used the disk utility to no avail.
I'll try it again.
 
Starting up with firewire external HD and using disk utility Partition failed with the error Input/output error
 
Ok I tried the firewire hook up to my other intel and I got an error on start up, saying the disk needs to be initialized. I clicked it and it opened disk utility. Then I clicked on the disk, still can't do anything with it. I try to partition it and it goes into the spinning circle.
 
It's doing the replacement that's the difficult bit ... the drive will be no more or less the cost of any drive you can buy, they are not special but you need a good reliable brand drive.

Here is a video that covers the replacement of an iMac HD:

intel iMac HD install
 
Forgot to add that although it is possible to do this upgrade yourself, you have to be extremely careful and go slowly.
 
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