Imac is dying or Mac OS X problem?

Hi everybody, here is the deal. One day as I'm turning on the computer (2008 imac) somebody (not going to say who) decides to just turn the computer off just about 3-4 seconds after I clicked the power button. When I booted up the computer again many things were wrong.

1. The computer runs extremely slow, both in my windows and mac partitions, I've pretty much concluded that this is hard drive problem since it takes forever to load applications and they run slow if and when they do finally load up.

2. Boot time is much greater, takes several minutes to fully boot up either of the partitions.

So I basically try to figure out what was wrong. I perform disk repair and verify disk operations from the disk utility, and the problem persists. I reinstall the mac OS (Leopard) with the archiving option. The problems still persist. It gets to a point where I can no longer even boot into the mac partition and if I try it keeps restarting itself. One time a no smoking sign came up without the cigarette (if that makes sense). The windows partition continues to run even slower. Sometimes I can't even log in to my account on the windows side and the computer freezes up. Eventually I ended wiping the mac partition completely and doing a fresh install of Leopard. It fixed the problem somewhat but I feel the mac isn't running as fast it was before and there are other problems. If I update to 10.5.8 the update fails with an error saying something about airport scripts.

Anyway I said fine then I won't update it. I decided to erase the windows partition that was still running slow after the fresh install. deleted it and proceeded to make another windows partition. I couldn't do it. The mac kept ejecting the installation CD, displaying Hard drive information incorrectly before partitioning (said I had 314 GB total, even though I have 250 GB HD!!!), and during the formatting of the windows installation said unable to format after sitting at 0% for about 30 min. I tried NTFS quick instead of NTFS formatting, when I did that, it said the hal.dll file was missing or corrupted. I gave up on a windows XP partition and figured maybe my disc was damaged or scratched. I erased the partition but the imac would still try to boot into Windows. I had to go into system pref and set default startup disk to the Macintosh HD (even though no other disk was there). So I tried burning a windows 7 release candidate iso onto a DVD to use that for the boot camp partition. It couldn't even burn the disc. Halfway through it stops and says unable to "burn "disc image name" 0x00000005". I read around it says the disc might not be compatible with the mac. I doubt it since I've burnt to these discs before without a hitch.

I'm really frustrated and pissed off and my hatred for Apple is at an all time high. Does anybody know what the heck I'm supposed to do or is this internal damage and it has to be taken to the shop. I don't think a computer should do this if someone turns it off prematurely.

 

You may have some sort of hardware issue that coincidentally started showing at the same time. If you’re able, the first thing I'd do is run the Hardware test tool (I think it's on Disk 1 – you have to have Leopard or SL disk 1 loaded and then boot while holding “D” I think) and do the extended hardware test; it takes a little while to complete but I think it's worth running. It'll test the CPU, RAM, HDD, optical drive etc... Otherwise a call to apple tech support or a visit to the apple store might be in order.

 

try resetting pram and recovering permissions!

 

Sounds like a harddrive problem.

You might want to listen to the drive spinup and if it's constantly ticking or creating a lot of noise(like spin up/spin down excessively).

I would backup your files as much as you can at this moment, or you could be losing them all when the hard drive dies completely.

Unfortunately, all hard disks fail eventually. I've had dozens of drives that just decided to not work properly with the click of death, spin up/spin down, bad sectors, no power etc . and this goes with all brands; Hitachi, Seagate, Maxtor(remember those?), Western Digital, Samsung, Fujitsu in all types of computers which include PCs and Apple as well.

So, this is not Apple's fault, Apple does not produce nor design hard disks(and a lot of the other components too) all they do is purchase them from the manufacturers to install into their machines.

So backup your personal files, work files and any other files that you can't afford to lose, then run to your nearest Apple store and have them look at your iMac, the sooner the better.

 

Ok, I reset the NVRAM, and did an extensive hardware test. As I suspected, it was a problem with the hard drive, or at least that's what the error said. Gave me this error 4HDD/11/40000004 SATA (0,0). Researched around and I guess it means my hard drive is failing =( Wow this sucks. I'm still wondering why I can't burn DVD's properly though, but I guess its a consequence of the hard drive. I've only had this computer for about 1.5 years =/. I guess I could replace the HD but I don't think it's too easily replaceable on this version of the Imac, unless anyone has tutorials to suggest?

Btw, thanks for the input guys.

 

I've seen a few videos of taking an imac apart but it's not for the faint of heart. I'm sure you'll find lots by googling it. This is why, IMO, it's so crucial to get AppleCare on things like this.

 

You can't burn a DVD because the file that had been stored on your hard disk is likely being corrupted so the data is incorrect, copying is also the case since the image is temporarily being store locally on your drive then burned back to your target disc. This could also apply to the DVD burning software, although more unlikely.

Good luck getting it repaired, I do not recommend swapping the Hard disk yourself as the iMac is an incredibly intricate and complex machine.

 

Here is the iMac 27" Disassembly, I don't think the 24" would be much different.