Does this sound like a hard drive failure

[rossipoo]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

I have an old 2006 Core Duo iMac which stopped working yesterday. I didn't see it crash, but aparently iTunes froze first while Safari remained operational for a bit before that too froze and then the whole system became frozen. It eventually slept, and if disturbed, it would try to wake, but would never show anything other than the cursor. After restarting it shows the "no" symbol and stops. I could hear almost no hard drive noise.

I don't have the original keyboard and the boot keys don't work so I can't see verbose mode. I don't have a local apple store, and I don't really want to pay the repair place to confirm the hard drive is the problem.

I am able to replace the drive myself, but I hope that someone might agree that the hard drive is likely before I buy a new one.
Thanks,

 

[pcorrado]

I think hard drive is a likely candidate and probably one of the first things I would try to replace. Was the drive excessively loud or making clicking noises in the days before the crash?

It may also be ram, a much less likely candidate, but would prevent post. (not sure if post is right for EFI). Power supply is also possible. I have had some PC's fail to boot due to a power supply no longer providing adequate power because of a short or burn out. However, I still the HD is the best bet to try first. Plus, they are so cheap these days you could end up with a nice upgrade!