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Weblog:   Curious iMac Hard Drive Failures
Subject:   another 1999 DV SE hard drive failure, and another
Date:   2002-12-08 20:45:04
From:   anonymous2
Mine died a couple of months ago just as you described. I then replaced the 13GB Quantum Fireball with a Western Digital 60 GB and installed Jaguar. This new drive died last week in a similar way: lots of extraneous seeking, then the awful groinking noises, then the disk spinning down on its own, and finally, nothing. I tried to repair it with the jaguar installation disk, but every time I ran the repair function it found new errors.
Is there something about this iMac model that kills drives? Or is it just mine? Has anyone else had a second drive failure?
I want my iMac up and running again, but I don't want to sacrifice another drive. Please post if you know the cause of this type of failure.
David W.
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Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

  • The answer to iMac DV HD problems/failures
    2005-02-12 09:41:11  1computergeek [Reply | View]

    I have an iMac DV 400, which came with a Seagate 20gig HD. It worked fine for a while, but when I started to leave it on for extended periods of time, the HD started to spin down by itself. After a while, the HD just wouldn't even spin-up at power-on. I thought it was the HD so I replaced it with an 80gig Maxtor. It worked fine for a month, then started making horrible sounds, bad blocks appearing, and then started spinning down randomly like the Seagate.

    I used to turn over the iMac and reseat the power and bus cables and then turn it back on, which fixed the problem temporarily. Anyway, I decided to buy an external FireWire enclosure for the HD to see if that would work. Lo and behold, BOTH hard-drives function perfectly. I can boot off my old hard-drves and they have no bad-blocks and work perfectly.

    So in conclusion, if you have iMac HD problems, go and buy a FireWire enlosure for your HD. The bus could be at fault, or I am thinking it is most likely the internal power to the HD which causes the problems. (anyone want to confirm this?)

    I hope you guys kept your supposed "Failed Hard Drive". I hope you also kept your iMac too...

    Good luck
  • another 1999 DV SE hard drive failure, and another
    2003-08-05 08:48:19  anonymous2 [Reply | View]

    Is there a manual online with step by step instructions for hard drive replacement?
Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.