I am hoping a few of you could give me a hand with this problem.... Recently, my 500 mhz slot loading iMac (640 mb RAM) has been seeming to deteriorate. It started off with frequent spinning beach ball episodes which now seem almost constant. I have to keep force quitting applications because they just seem to crash (i.e. endless spinning ball). It does not matter which application I am using....the iMac is almost constantly processing. I am running OS X.1.5.
Last week, I ended up force quitting so much I decided to restart the machine. When it came back on, I just heard a steady clicking sound and there was a disk in the middle of a gray screen with a question mark flashing on it. After running Disk First Aid off the OS 9 install disk a few times, the errors were finally repaired (including BTree errors). I changed the start up disk and got my desktop back at which point I made several back up disks of all my important files. Since then, I have continued to get this spinning beach ball. I call Applecare and he told me that my hard drive was probably failing. He had me put in the OS X install disk and pull up disk utilities to mount the hard drive. We couldn't get the hard drive to mount at all. He told me the only way to see if the hard drive was indeed failing was to initialize the hard drive and zero all the data. If the initialization was not successful, the hard drive would have to be replaced. Is there any other way to test the hard drive besides initializing it ? I thought the extra RAM would speed things up and stop the beach ball thing but he said the reason it isn't is because the hard drive is failing. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Last time Applecare told me to initialize the hard drive, I found out later that it had probably not been necessary. Amber -- The iMac List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | - Epson Stylus Color 580 Printers - new at $69 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> iMac List info: <http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:imac-list@;mail.maclaunch.com> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:imac-list-off@;mail.maclaunch.com> For digest mode, email: <mailto:imac-list-digest@;mail.maclaunch.com> Subscription questions: <mailto:listmom@;lemlists.com> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/imac-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
