Apple iMac problems

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I have had my iMac for close to 2 years now,not had a problem so far, but recently have noticed it slowing down majorly for normal usage, on iTunes freezing every few minutes, etc. So have had a look at the hard drive using disk utility - first of all, it could not repair the disk as the catalog B tree was broken (gave me a variety of errors, include invalid node structure, key length, etc.) Rebooting in Single User Mode, I was able to recursively rebuild the catalog tree file (using fsck -r /dev/rdisk0s2) although I had to run the command 3 or 4 times until it worked, following this I tried a general check (fsck -fy) which gave me a "seems to be no errors" message. Using the Disk Utility also gave this message, passing the drive as fine. SO I began reusing the compuet, however, the problem had not gone away at all, was still freezing up and being generally slow.

I had a look around and it seemed like the problem was with bad sectors on the hard drive; so I decided to do a reformat with a fresh install of the OS X - first I began by trying to zero-out the drive (which on OS X will mark all bad sectors it finds as bad, preventing the system from trying to write to these sectors) - however, this did not work (left it for 4 hours when we went out, came back to find the progress bar had hardly moved and it saying we had 90 hours to wait till it finished!). Abandoned that idea, just reformatted the disk and reinstalled, but the system STILL seemed to be slow. That was last night. This morning, tried to put some of my old files back, but was really slow (took around 10 mins just to transfer 70 MB of photos from the external HDD!); it then crashed so had to power it off and back on . It now can't even boot into the OS (gave me an connection error with /dev/disk0s2 repeatedly) so launched the Install Disc to have a look. Again, the disk utility could nnot verify or repair the disk, this time giving me "Invalid Sibling Links" in the catalog file.

Any suggestions, as at the moment it seems I will have to change the hard drive

Scott

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    bbwibbwi Posts: 812member
    Yes, you need a new hard drive. Your HD has bad sectors which means your HD is physically failing
  • Reply 2 of 3
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bbwi View Post


    Yes, you need a new hard drive. Your HD has bad sectors which means your HD is physically failing



    yes, i agree
  • Reply 3 of 3
    macxpressmacxpress Posts: 5,801member
    x3 on the hard drive. Hope everything is backed up!
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