So last night I turned on the old iMac to do some Web design work. I hadn’t used it in a few days, and it’s been a very humid weekend in New York.
It starts up OK, but soon the hard drive (I assume…though I suppose it could be something else) starts making this horrible, intermittent clicking noise. A LOUD noise. Made me think back to my old Apple IIe and the nasty grinding noises I’d get out of its floppy drive. Soon, of course, the iMac crashed.
I restarted it over and over for about 45 minutes. (I was going to start up from a diagnostic CD, but there was already a disc in the slot from before…doh.) Pulled the plug completely a few times, even tried the command-option-P-R keystroke recommended in the manual. No luck. It just won’t get that far.
Eventually, for no reason I can fathom, I get past the startup phase and see an ordinary desktop. Hooray! I restart it again for good measure and diagnose it with Norton Utilities–and find nothing. What the heck?
The only possible explanation that came to mind (not backed up by anything I could find in Apple’s online Tech Info Library) was that the humidity was so high that moisture had accumulated inside the hard drive, and it took that 45 minutes of operation to heat the machine up enough to bake it out.
What do you all think? Moisture? Something else? And what’s the likelihood of (a) this happening again (b) my drive suffering a fatal failure?
Are you certain that it was not the CD reader making the noise ? The CD/DVD drive in a slot loading iMac can get pretty loud when it’s seeking with a foggy lens or on a scratched disk. The CD/DVD drive is also quite quite good at crashing the whole machine when it becomes unhappy.
Your hard drive is sealed against changes in humidity, and should NEVER make loud noises unless something has gone horribly wrong.
I had this problem a while back on my Gateway PC -
I don’t know what HDD an imac has, but this was a Quantum Fireball 10Gb. The drive made a LOUD tapping noise, then refused to work (Blue screen of death, complete siezure etc.).
The problem got more frequent, to the point that the disk would not run for more than 2 minutes without clattering to a halt - often the computer wouldn’t even recognise the drive was there. Tried cleaning connections etc. etc.
Luckily, I put it in a friend’s computer and managed to back up the important stuff before it completely screwed itself up.
Interestingly, it seemed to run for longer after a cold night, but got worse and worse as it warmed up.
When told about this the tech support people sent a new (20GB) Western digital drive straight away.
Apple has a discussion board, and I found several threads on noisy iMac hard drives there. I’ve read through most of them, and in most cases, the hard drives had to be replaced.
Take your 'puter to a knowledgeable and authorized Apple service provider and have them look it over. There’s always the chance that the hard drive’s not the problem (it could be the CD drive, as Squink said). And if it is the hard drive, you’ll need to get it replaced by a service provider anyway.
FWIW, iMacs do have Quantum Fireball hard drives. Or at least mine does.
