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Weblog:   Curious iMac Hard Drive Failures
Subject:   The answer to iMac DV HD problems/failures
Date:   2005-02-12 09:41:11
From:   1computergeek
Response to: another 1999 DV SE hard drive failure, and another

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
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  • The answer to iMac DV HD problems/failures
    2005-08-11 12:13:47  imacquestion [Reply | View]

    I have an Imac DV 400 Graphite with a 13 Gig hard drive and I have experienced the same HD failure described by others in this blog. How did you get your Imac 400 DV to boot up from the external hard drive? This was the solution that I thought I would try but the Mac OS 9 Bible, pg 829, says this cannot be done?
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