iMac froze this morning, now HD is grinding - help!

[Hello.there]

For the second morning running I had trouble waking my iMac from its sleep, both times I had to restart when everything froze (eg was able to start Thunderbird, but then it seized up). Jeez, it brought me back to my Windows' days

After restarting it this morning the hard drive has been grinding non-stop, which it never did before. I have loads of free space on the HD so that can't be the problem. I haven't added any apps to the iMac the last couple of days, only copied a DVD (that I own!) to the HD.

Any ideas what might suddenly be causing the trouble? Thanks.

 

[Sherman Homan]

Never a good thing when your hard drive is grinding! Boot from the installation CD, when the installation starts, choose your language, but then go up to the menu bar. Select Utilities, Disk Utility and look at the S.M.A.R.T status. If it says Verified, then run Repair Disk. If it says Failing, back up your data! Even a new drive can fail.

 

[Hello.there]

Never a good thing when your hard drive is grinding! Boot from the installation CD, when the installation starts, choose your language, but then go up to the menu bar. Select Utilities, Disk Utility and look at the S.M.A.R.T status. If it says Verified, then run Repair Disk. If it says Failing, back up your data! Even a new drive can fail.

Thanks Sherman, will do that. Maybe 'grinding' isn't exactly the right description, more like a HD working far too frantically to read stuff....or is that the same thing?? Panic set in because a Toshiba laptop of mine gave up a couple of months ago, and the whole process began with a HD making strange sounds.

PS Restarted the iMac again and the HD seems fine, but worried that it'll all start again in the morning after it has its night's sleep.

 

[Sesibor]

try to check your RAM, or up the memory if applicable..

 

[MattyP30]

is spotlight indexing?