Mac dying?

Veljo

Veljo

Mac Enthusiast
I've been noticing lately that the hard disk in my iMac is becoming increasingly slower, and error prone. I recently had to fix a major error that came up out of nowhere using Disk Utility. The entire system also freezes every time I verify the disk; I can't even move the cursor till it's done.

Despite doing a full format, my system takes close to 10 minutes to start up and log in totally. Also, every day tasks seem to be taking a lot longer, with the hard disk taking a while to supply the relevant data.

I was just curious to get the opinions of those here; does anyone think that maybe my hard disk is on the way out?
 
The disk would be a good bet. Have you checked the SMART status? It should be shown in Disk Utility. Disks are cheap anyways, you could upgrade to something bigger and not feel like you wasted money if it wasn't the problem.

edit: oh you have a G4 iMac... might be a little more tricky. Do you have a firewire disk or something external you could try installing OS X?
 
Veljo said:
The entire system also freezes every time I verify the disk; I can't even move the cursor till it's done.
Click to expand...
This much is normal. Disk Utility normally can't verify a disk without unmounting it. Since you can't unmount your startup disk, Disk Utility instead halts all processes, so that they can't use the disk while it's being verified. This is a crude but effective hack that was introduced in Tiger. Before Tiger, you simply couldn't verify the startup volume — you had to boot from a CD or another HD to do it, which was much more of a hassle than having your OS freeze for a few minutes. I wish Apple would put a warning dialog in there, though, as it is very disconcerting!

As for the rest of the problems, it sounds more like a software problem to me, but I could easily be wrong. Have you been careful not to let your disk fill up at any point?
 
HateEternal, smart status says 'Verified'. Mikuro, no, I always stick to the 15% free rule, and at the moment I have about 50% of my drive free.
 
Verifying the hard drive while booted from the hard drive, even though you can do it, is extremely inaccurate and will ALWAYS produce certain error messages. Your best bet is to boot from an OS X Install CD/DVD and use the Disk Utility on the CD/DVD to verify/repair the hard drive.
 
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