I kept one iMac that suffered a fatal crash of its original internal drive some years ago just by buying an external drive, connecting it to to the iMac, and installing a brand new system on it from the DVD.
One great thing that happened was that not only the iMac started up perfectly —is still running— but, to my surprise, the old drive showed up in the Finder some few hours later! I can access that drive still for old files (everything was copied to a different drive), but can't be repaired, unmounted, nor changed.
Now, every time that iMac starts up (not too often, I don't turn Macs off) the Finder pops a message saying "The RockStone drive couldn't be repaired." ... or something along those lines.
I reckon it was the cheapest alternative I had (no money for Mac repair shops back then), and that it was risky not knowing at all if it was the Mac, but, hey, it worked for me.
YMWV.
Hi Vince,
As I wrote a few minutes ago, I tried holding down the "D" key while booting, but it had no effect, so I guess my system does not have the hardware test built-in (or it is too messed up to get to it).
I guess the next step is to either take the iMac to a repair shop or to try inserting the hardware diagnostic DVD. Do you have a good sense for whether or not I might be able to boot from the DVD and, if not, whether I could get the DVD out?
Is there a command from single user mode to eject the DVD? Does this usually work?
Gregg
On Oct 30, 2011, at 5:43 PM, Vince LaMonica wrote:
> On Oct 30, 2011, at 5:34 PM, Gregg Dinse wrote:
>
>> I was able to boot in single user mode and was given the option of exiting or running fsck, so I chose the latter and typed what the message said: /sbin/fsck/ -fy
>>
>> I got a few lines of output, which ended by saying:
>>
>> invalid index key (4, 7173)
>> rebuilding catalog B-tree
>> The volume MacHD could not be repaired
>
> Sounds like the drive is definitely bad. What you need to determine is if anything else is bad. If you can run the hardware test, that should help: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1509 If it only finds the HD bad [this is, assuming you can boot into the AHT mode or boot from the DVD that has AHT on it], then a simple replacement of the HD should have you back in business [though I don't believe an iMac's HD is easy to replace, so I'd recommend taking it to an authorized Apple Repair Center and having them install your spare HD - I've done that before and they have no problem putting in a user-purchased drive, as long as it meets the specs of the Mac [eg: SATA, etc]].
>
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