Imac Hard Drive Replacement is by far the most common repair that we do on Imacs to this date. we get probable 3-4 a week. Other than that honestly imacs are pretty legit.
Except some cases when they overheat or something else happens to the logic board itself. in that scenario you either have a choice of replacing a logic board or get a new imac.
so how do you know that imac hard disk might be failing on your Imac? the symptoms of the failing hard drive on imac could be following:
a) you get a spinning circle (the beach ball) more than usual and for more extended periods of time.
b) your imac takes long time to boot up or sometime stays on the start up screen with apple logo for longer time than usual.
c) you get error messages in mac os that say mac os couldn’t repair this disk
at some worst cases you get a question mark logo when computer boots. but thats usually when the imac hard drive has already failed and is no longer recognized by imac at all.
Now imac failing hard drive has nothing really to do with apple computer at all. because hard drives fail just as much in macbooks, or pc desktops and laptops as well. its just a nature of the hard drives. only the new generation Solid State Hard Drives, which do not have any moving parts inside. they aren’t so sensitive to many different things that can ruin the usual hard drives we have been using for many years. but thats a different topic of course.
usual hard drives with moving parts they just fail for many reasons. due to overheating, due to physical external damage such as dropping, hitting, bumping, etc. sometimes they start going out because of manufacturers defects, or just simple wear and tear.
inside of imac usually its because of heat and other factors that relate to age and wear and tear and perhaps original defects. since no one really moves imacs around like they do with laptop computers.
so what can you do about this imac hard drive failure?
first and foremost one needs to start backing up their data. that is the most intelligent preventive thing you can do for yourself.
secondly in any Mac OS X, be it 10.4 (tiger), 10.5(leopard), 10.6(snow leopard), 10.7(Lion) or 10.8(Mountain Lion) you can use a tool which is called Disk Utility (found in (Applications->Utilities) here you can periodically verify disk permissions and verify disk and disk volumes itself. it checks for errors and consistencies.
Although this tool is not very accurate it is nonetheless very useful and catching some of the errors that may arise before your imac hard drive crashes and it is too late.
that being said, Disk Utility isn’t the ultimate tool for hard drive testing. It does quite a bit, but many times it is also not very reliable to make a 100% diagnostic. and in my experience to hard drive testing tool ever is. but this one will give you some heads up. and you can at least know there is something going on so you can investigate further.
the problem with Imac of course is imac hard drives are not very easily accessible. One must take it apart pretty much all the way, take of the glass, outside cover, lcd screen just to get to the hard drive. which is not a very easy task if you have never done it. so you are kind of limited and most recommended thing is to bring your imac to a professional like us at Overnight Pc Repair and Mac. We will do your Imac Hard Drive Replacement for you in no time!
call us at 818-532-9333 or just stop by at 22941 Ventura bl. Ste G, Woodland Hills, Ca 91364
cheers!
