Constant tapping noise

Well if it seems to be working fine then it's not DOA. If the hard drive was clicking and failing you would not be able to do much with it. I have heard of other people having this problem and it could be one of the internal fans making the noise. There is really nothing you can do about it but to call Apple and have the fan replaced.

If you want to verify that your drive is indeed working normally then do the following: Open up Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility select your hard drive on the left and look to see at the bottom it says S.M.A.R.T. Status Verified. Next under the First Aide tab click on Verify Disk. Then if you have Apple Care, open the Apple Care box and inside should be a TechTool Disk. Install TechTool Pro and under the options select Surface Scan. This will scan your entire hard drive for bad blocks.

George

I just got a new iMac a few days ago and noticed this noise yesterday. Tapping or clicking is exactly how I would describe it as well. Maybe about 4 taps/clicks per second. My wife's iMac (exact same model but a few months older) does NOT make this noise. I can only hear it when the room is fairly quiet, but it's incredibly annoying when I do hear it.

I do not think it's the hard drive though, since I can hear it make its own clicks under heavy load and they seem to come from a different area of the computer.

Hi, maybe a cooling fan blade out of alignment..Call or Visit - Apple..L

My tapping noise is not constant, but it comes and goes. I took it back to the Apple Store after the AppleCare tech said it was a failing HDD. The Apple Store replaced the HDD and I still have the same tapping noise. This isn't a HDD issue, so I am guessing fan. I ran a "yes" command in the terminal and got the CPU working at 100%, but it doesn't make the sound. It just makes the sound when it wants to. Really weird. I even downloaded iStat menus and studied the fan speed and cpu speed and there is no correlation. I'm stumped.

And to make matters worse, the installed 10.4.11 instead of 10.5.2 which was previously installed. Very surprised by the carelessness of Apple... Totally unexpected.

What location is it coming from on the back on the Mac?

Bottom left corner under the left speaker.

I took it to the Apple Store today and I couldn't make it reproduce the sound...but when it sits on my desk at home it is painfully obvious something is not right. For the first 2 months, that computer was the quietest computer I had ever worked on. I now think it is either the HDD fan or the CPU fan... it is certainly not the Optical Drive fan. They are keeping it for observation in hopes they can reproduce the sound.

I will post a response once I get it back. Hopefully by next weekend.

ac

OK, it may be the speaker or fan. What happens if you plug headphones in?

The tapping noise is gone, so far, but now I have a dead pixel (black), a 1" scratch on the top of the machine, and on the left-hand side of the glass, it looks like someone pried a screwdriver between the glass and the aluminum to get the glass out (i guess) and left an indentation in the aluminum.

Beyond the fact that I paid $2000 for this machine, the customer service, support, and overall experience from Apple has been horrible. I am just disgusted.

I know, they said it would be $300 to repair my iBook.