iMac hdd death

[idkmybffjill]

Last night I went to use my intel 20" iMac (which was already on) only to find an error message telling me to restart it and so I did. It began to start up normally, white screen and apple startup sound were there, but there was also a sort of chirping noise coming from inside of the mac and rather than an apple on my screen there was a folder with a question mark. I eventually restarted again with the same results. I placed the install disk in and used disk utility, it didn't see my hdd! This morning I tried it again and it started up fine, but after a short while the chirping returned and I was met with a never ending beachball.

I'm no rocket scientist, but I conclude that the hdd is dying/dead. The mac is from 2006 I believe, so it's no longer under warranty. I'm a million miles from any computer stores that deal with macs. So, pretty much I'm going to replace the damn hdd myself or it's not likely to happen anytime soon.

Question number 1: Do you agree with my assessment of a dying hdd?
Question 2: How do I replace it?

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

It does sound like a HD malfunction. If you can get it to show up in disk utility run "verify disk" to see what it tells you. It will tell you if the HD is bad or is going bad.

As far as replacing the drive goes, you can do a google search on how to do it. I've been able to find some really good step by step instructions on how to replace drives in everything from older iMacs to PowerBooks and MacBooks. Good luck!

 

[idkmybffjill]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5F136 Safari/525.20)

It does sound like a HD malfunction. If you can get it to show up in disk utility run "verify disk" to see what it tells you. It will tell you if the HD is bad or is going bad.

As far as replacing the drive goes, you can do a google search on how to do it. I've been able to find some really good step by step instructions on how to replace drives in everything from older iMacs to PowerBooks and MacBooks. Good luck!

I tried verify disk, but it doesn't seem to do anything at all. A progress bar appears for less than a second and then nothing else happens.

 

[Satori]

This site may help (the manual available here is for an early 2006 iMac)
http://www.sduk.baconeggs.com/manuals/index.htm