[X4U] imac and beach ball

[Jeff Carruthers]

On May 19, 2008, at 7:12 PM, alexandre wrote:

> hi
>
> i have a 24" intel imac ("late 2006") that has been working fine  
> until last friday. that day, i took it to the local mac dealer to  
> have the hard drive upgraded, from the original 250gb to a 1000gb. i  
> decided to go for a samsung s-ata II spinpoint F1 with 32b cache at  
> 7200rmp. the installation was done by the dealer. at another dealer,  
> i bought a 3gb ram module, to bring up the total ram to 3gb, the  
> maximum on the machine.
>
> with the new drive, i thought it was a good time to upgrade to  
> leopard… and since then i've re-installed leopard 3 times! on a  
> regular basis, i'm getting the beach ball for about 15 to 20  
> seconds. the computer hangs (but i can still move the cursor) and  
> then everything is ok again. for example, software update is  
> downloading updates, i'm moving around a few windows and the whole  
> thing just freezes… very, very annoying.
>
> <snip>
>
> so… i'm begining to think there is a problem with the new drive.
>
> is there anything i can still do besides taking it back to the shop  
> for a hard drive exchange?
>
> alexandre
> 17" 2.33ghz ic2d macbook pro / 2.0gb / 160gb / X.5.2
> 24" 2.33ghz ic2d imac / 2.0gb / 250gb / X.4.11


I'd try booting the machine off a Firewire external drive and see how  
that works. Be sure that the external hard drive is formatted and  
partitioned to work on an Intel Mac (use the GUID partition).

If you have a copy of Disk Warrior (version 4.1), I'd put it on the  
external drive and then run it to see whether it can fix the internal  
drive. Disk Warrior works wonders in situations where a hard drive is  
having problems.

Hope this helps.

Jeff
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