Hard Disk on the way out?

[B.A.]

I think my hard disk is on the outs. Over the past few days whenever I use my iMac, it has been operating terribly slow. I can't do anything without getting the beach ball. I booted up (which takes about 10 mins) and tried to run disk utility to repair permissions, which ended up bringing up the kernel panic screen. I connected the iMac in firewire disk mode to my MacBook. The disk mounted quickly, but when I try to access files in Finder I get a spinning wheel in the bottom right of the Finder window.

So, would this seem to indicate my hard disk is on the way out? Or do these symptoms indicate something else? I have most of my files backed up on an external so I should be ok in that regard, but I just wanted to know if anyone has experience with this.

 

[mastershakess]

try booting from the disk and running disk utility from there

 

[B.A.]

Good thought, I ended up doing that very late last night and got an error message saying the disk could not be mounted. For some reason, I was able to restart a few times to boot from the disk which allowed me to erase the hard drive. So I have started clean, everything seems to be running smoothly. I guess it was not the physical drive. Just going through that ever so tedious process of reinstalling everything from disks and reloading media from external drives.

 

[chscag]

Just don't stop making those backups!

Regards.