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iMac HDD S.M.A.R.T
- Thread starter rhtvkm
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Your drive is dying. It will not get better.
Go and buy a new SATA drive and a SATA/USB or SATA/Firewire enclosure TODAY and do a full clone of your drive with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.
(go to www.versiontracker.com to get those shareware utilities)
Then swap that drive into your iMac. Take the machine to a technician if you have never done hardware repairs before, most iMacs are moderately difficult to work in.
(I am assuming it is a relatively recent iMac with a SATA 3.5" internal drive. Check first.)
Go and buy a new SATA drive and a SATA/USB or SATA/Firewire enclosure TODAY and do a full clone of your drive with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.
(go to www.versiontracker.com to get those shareware utilities)
Then swap that drive into your iMac. Take the machine to a technician if you have never done hardware repairs before, most iMacs are moderately difficult to work in.
(I am assuming it is a relatively recent iMac with a SATA 3.5" internal drive. Check first.)
Excellent advice CanadaRAM. As you say, the drive will not get better and complete failure is imminent. 
If you don't want to pay for a technician to replace your HDD, or simply do not have easy access to one, you can always run your system off that new drive as an external as well. It's obviously not as elegant of a solution, but the replacement of your existing internal is not mandatory. I believe both CCC and SD make bootable copies of your system, so you should be fine. Macs used to only be able to boot off FW devices (pre-Tiger I believe?) but now USB 2.0 works as well.
If you don't want to pay for a technician to replace your HDD, or simply do not have easy access to one, you can always run your system off that new drive as an external as well. It's obviously not as elegant of a solution, but the replacement of your existing internal is not mandatory. I believe both CCC and SD make bootable copies of your system, so you should be fine. Macs used to only be able to boot off FW devices (pre-Tiger I believe?) but now USB 2.0 works as well.