Q: harddisk not found on reboot
Hello,
I am relatively new to mac (more a pc user). However my girlfriend has an iMac (early 2008 model, 24inch, 4GB memory, 500GB Harddrive) that started to run slow. So she asked me to check it out. I have bought osX Lion, burnt it on DVD and reintalled the machine. It has not been 100% successfull, even though I doubt it comes from the osX. The first issue was that the machine frooze while using. With the help of google I found posts about heat issues and that a program called smcFanControl can solve that. So I installed, and indeed it work pretty well as long as the machine does not turn into sleep mode. In case it does, it most cases it freezes. Then when trying to reboot, the blinking folder appears indicating that there is not startup disk. Starting from the Lion DVD and using Disk utility, I can see that the harddrive is not listed. Waiting an hour or so, the machine starts and runs smoothly.
So my questions are:
- could I conclude that the issue I have is caused by overheating?
- what can I do to prevent this from happening?
Any insight, advice, help is much appreciated.
Merci,
Roel
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7)
Posted on Jul 28, 2011 10:49 AM
An external run on Firewire 800 will run pretty fast. May just take a bit longer to boot up. I know someone else who was in this predicament with a 24, but he had AppleCare and that took care of replacing the drive and the power supply, which was also failing. In your case, I don't know. In general, replacing a drive, is far less expensive than a new machine. I'd get it fixed, but that's for you to decide.
I think this may have been a particular issue with these 24s. I haven't heard of any issues with heat like this with the newer iMacs. But, I've always felt that the fans aren't ramped up quickly enough to deal with heat in any of the iMacs. Apple appears to prefer selling computers with quiet fans to making the hardware last. That said, I don't hear the fans even when ramped up three or four hundred rpms. If your fans were letting the drive into the sixties, then I think that's a likely cause of the failure.
If you run a fan at the back, use smcFan and keep the air intake vents clean by periodically vacuuming, that should help keep the heat under control.
Posted on Jul 28, 2011 3:36 PM







