2008 24" iMac possible hard drive issue?

[coneman5259]

My tried and true iMac started freezing up after prolonged use and after a couple days started freezing up right after start up. The mouse still moves though when it freezes up making me think it was the graphics card a 2600 nvidia pro I believe. But the more I think about it the more I hope it's a hard drive because the graphics cards are expensive and hard to replace.

I ran disk utility and it didn't find anything so I was hoping that somebody on here had similar issues and it was their hard drive.

Any advice would be helpful. Thank you.

 

[hwojtek]

2600 is an ATI, not Nvidia.
Why are you hoping it's the disk, if DU doesn't show any problems with the disk? If the check went OK it's highly unlikely the disk is shot.
Try fiddling with RAM, starting the computer with a single DIMM stick in different slots. Maybe it's RAM-related.

 

[coneman5259]

2600 is an ATI, not Nvidia.
Why are you hoping it's the disk, if DU doesn't show any problems with the disk? If the check went OK it's highly unlikely the disk is shot.
Try fiddling with RAM, starting the computer with a single DIMM stick in different slots. Maybe it's RAM-related.

Hmmmm, I did change out the ram a year ago. I'll try that. I was hoping it was the disk because it's a easy fix for this iMac, cheaper and easier than a graphics card. And you're right about the ATI, I meant Radeon, not nvidia. Thank you.

 

[WorkerBee2015]

Hmmmm, I did change out the ram a year ago. I'll try that. I was hoping it was the disk because it's a easy fix for this iMac, cheaper and easier than a graphics card. And you're right about the ATI, I meant Radeon, not nvidia. Thank you.

The easiest thing for you to do is attach a second hard drive externally to the unit, install OS X on that, boot off of that, eject the internal drive, and see if the problems continue. When testing on a clients site I use an external drive just like I described and then use Scannerz on it. In your case, because the problem sounds like it's severe, I would think the thing wouldn't even allow a Scannerz test to begin, so just trying to use the external would probably be a good enough test. Put simply, if it runs just fine off the external then your drive or something associated with it is to blame, but if the problems still exist, it's either logic board, supply, or graphics card related.

Disk Utility typically will not tell you much. It's for repairing indexing problems on the disk, fixing permissions, and formatting, etc. but it has no real testing capability. If you've seen other artifacts like screen flicker, lines jumping through the display, etc, before this all happened, then the graphics card is probable. You might want to do a web search on the symptoms of a graphics card failure for 2008 units.

Good Luck.