intel imac hard drive sinking ship (beware)

[Paper Crane]

mods, move to help section if you must, however, i think the majority of users frequent this section more.

okay. i'm gonna try and lay this out as best as possible. my imac stopped booting up recently. when i fire it up regularly i get a grey screen, apple logo, rotating wheel, then solely a grey screen with a prohibitory sign:

 i've tried many attempts at fixing this but i can't seem to gain any progress. here's what i know:

1. single user mode (command-s at start up) fails to let me use the fs check command, instead, providing me with this error: 'error loading 'mach_kernel' (0x9)'
2. i cannot get it to boot in safe mode (holding shift on start up) at all. mac just shuts itself off during grey screen.
3. verbose mode (command-v at start up) is acting just like single user mode.
4. when i press option during start up i can see my mac os x install disk and my poor hard drive.
5. i booted off my mac os x disk (holding c during start up).  i hoped to use 'disk utility' in attempt to use the 'repair disk' feature but it's greyed out.
6. when i click verify disk, i get a error as well. 
7. the internet tells me that people with greyed out repair disk buttons are result of not booting directly from cd, yet i have been.

i have about 2 months of files that i hadn't backed up. i'm just trying to figure out a way to get this mac to boot up in order to run time-machine one last time using my external hard drive before i replace this internal one. 

over and out,

t o

[Commercial D]

Sounds like a dead HDD to me. It happens a lot. Always back your shit up. Preferably twice.

[Donkey Lips]

are you still on warranty? i'd take it back and see if they can echo the drive to another one.

[grimcity]

Sounds like a dead HDD to me.

Yeah, those are some pretty suck things to hear man... I agree that it sounds like your hard drive is jacked. You went through the motions fine, but it sounds dead to me. The last thing to do is set it up externally and see if another machine can read it.

[layzieyez]

If you know someone that can lend you their mac, you can boot into target disk mode from firewire where your computer shows up as an external harddrive for the most part on their computer.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661

[Paper Crane]

are you still on warranty? i'd take it back and see if they can echo the drive to another one.

sadly, no.

Expand Quote

Sounds like a dead HDD to me.

[close]

Yeah, those are some pretty suck things to hear man... I agree that it sounds like your hard drive is jacked. You went through the motions fine, but it sounds dead to me. The last thing to do is set it up externally and see if another machine can read it.

If you know someone that can lend you their mac, you can boot into target disk mode from firewire where your computer shows up as an external harddrive for the most part on their computer.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661

by using a firewire, i'd be able to manage files from the downed imac with my macbook. so, in theory, i'd be able to hook up an external drive to my macbook, extract important stuff from the imac and place them on my external through my macbook?

thanks again.

[layzieyez]

No prob.  I used to lurk the macaddict messageboard for free tech advice all the time.  Dudes had a better/faster turnaround than the genius bar and the community aspect of mac users in general seems to be more friendly for those who are new or just plain need a little help to get something done.  Whenever I had any problems, within 24 hours, someone would have replied to my post with a very informative piece of advice to get my mac up and running again.  I'm just paying it forward.

[Nameuser]

Same shit happened to me on my 13 inch Macbook.  Runs even faster now that I have no new HDD in.

[Fongstarr.]

Yes...it is the harddrive. My brother helped me install a new one and actually extracted all my stuff off my old one. But once you replace it, it should be cool. Hopefully you have a warrently cause labor at Apple stores are regular.