imac 24, 2.8 extreme hard drive failure?

What can I say? After two weeks in the Apple store, it has been returned with a new logic board. Now, it is at least showing a variance in temperature (which it wasn't before) but there is a constant high pitched whirr, which runs for a few minutes, then winds down like a motorbike driving past, then starts up again after a minute.
Interestingly, I am also running WIndows 7 on a partitioned hard drive. Following the last crash, I lost my user account (restored from backup drive) but now very worried that this machine is on its last legs after only 7 months.

I plan to return it this weekend and ask for a refund. I will pay the extra and get a new 27inch mac, which doesn't seem to have the power/drive/logic board fails that this model is getting.

Interestingly, I see that the 24 inch model is now discontinued - coincidence?

Hmm, my first generation 20" Intel iMac's drive seems to have just bit the dust now that it's about two months out of warranty! Lots of disconcerting clunking noises when it would try to start up, and it couldn't get past a blank grey screen. I don't know what brand the drive is.

Ive also got an imac approx 18 months old which has a hard drive failure looks like this is not such an isolated problem

Hey gang. Well, as much as I didn't want to believe it, my 24" 2.8 ghz Mid 2007 iMac should be added to the extreme hard drive failure club. And after reading the repeated "18 months" number it seems, that if that the Hard Drives are not failing at 18 months, then pushing the HD past that date becomes an exercise of patience. That was the case with my iMac. It got so bad that I finally decided it was time to restore the system from my Time Capsule backup via ethernet.

Now, when Macs provide users with an ETA and a progress bar, usually the process is significantly quicker than even the projected time. So when the process started and the ill-fated iMac gave me a projected time of 106 hours to restore the system from disk I wasn't worried. I should have been. The actual time for the system restore from Time Capsule to the sickly iMac wasn't 106 hours, but rather 138 hours.

When it was all said and done...it rebooted...to a grey screen with a "no" symbol ... yes, Kernel Panic.
Still naive and falsely confident I could conquer the demon inside my Silver beauty, I forged on but this time I decided to erase the disk. ... which took almost as long as the system restore.

Losing faith in my abilities, I booted up in safe mode and ran a file system check: "Invalid node structure" ... I went into denial. After reinstalling OS X, it finally booted up. But things were quickly going south. Windows wouldn't close, the mouse was skipping and jerking on the screen, but the biggest issue was with the Audio Driver doing things as random as it gets. The next day upon reboot, kernel panic. ... which had me throw in the towel.

I didn't have AppleCare, but 6 days ago I took her to the Apple Store 40 miles away, where she's been getting the spa treatment. They've been very vauge over the phone regarding what is going on, but from what little information I've received it seems the Hard Drive has been replaced, possibly the Optical Drive as well, and the caveat: THE HARD DRIVE BLOWER. Honestly, I didn't think my Aluminum Sweetheart had a fan at all. I used to use the iStats Widget to keep track of her temperature, and if it WAS working out-of-box, it never worked well.

This post should serve as a warning to those who own the same 2.8 extreme hard drive Mid-2007 iMac. If you think it's slowing down....it is. If you think it's running hot, chances are ... it is. And if it begins doing strange things, you better have some kind of plan because it'll only be a matter of time.

I'm hoping to have my All-In-One Speedster back soon; prior to or upon which I will provide an update to my saga.

pulsesonic.net
pulsesonic@me.com
iTunes: "Pulse Sonic"

Update: Picking my iMac up today from the Apple Store. They are waiving the Labor costs completely, which is pretty incredible...considering how much work it took. The Apple Store and Apple Customer Service win in my heart again! Maybe I can get AppleCare for my new HD? At this point, she's all done and gonna purr like a new Ferrari!

I've now personally dealt with (4) 24" iMac's having their WD HD's fail on friends computers. All were about 14-18 months old. None were able to get data recovered by the time I replaced their drives for them. All exhibited the same symptoms, slow, hangs, lost OS system folder icon. All of them have been working fine since I swapped their drives out for them. I also have a 24" imac that I immediately swapped with a 1.5TB seagate drive when I bought it and that has had no problems. Honestly I am shocked I haven't heard more chatter about this, of the 10 iMacs I know of, 4 have died and I expect more to come.

Just wanted to chime in. I also have a friend whose iMac's HD had recently failed. The iMac was about a year and some months old. Luckily they have Apple care and Apple replaced the HD free of charge. Unfortunately, they lost all of their family's videos and photos. I felt pretty embarrassed and upset having recommended they switch to a Mac in the first place and this is what they get. Just wanted to know if anyone here who's had their HD fail had any luck retrieving the lost files?

Our Imac 24 just had a hard drive failure this past week, got it new 11/08. Called for support and then went to apple and they replaced the hard drive free of charge, installed bigger and faster one as the old one not made anymore, in on Monday back Saturday. Restored system through TM.

Was there a prior symptom to any of these failures which sounded like the HD was parking excessively? A 'clicking' sound from the computer?

My iMac has just started to do this after I upgraded to snow leopard and windows 7, the drive parks about 6-10 times in a row when I start the computer or wake it from sleep and also intermittently when the computer is in use (mainly browsing or watching dvds).

I had a kernel panic the other day which by blind luck I got out of and booted one of my partitions, I can get at both currently, but I think it's only a matter of time till the drive bites the dust. Any thoughts?

Count me too. I have a 24 inch imac when I bought it I had the hdd upgraded to the 500 gb it was a WD. At about 9 mounths it failed. It was replaced under warranty with another WD 500 gb. It failed just last week. I bet apple has see a lot of these drives fail. Unless apple makes this right I will never purchase an apple product again.

I work at a university and we are having the exact same issues. One iMac dies every week, same symptoms as described by others in this forum. Read/write speeds become incredibly slow and soon after the machine cannot locate the startup disk. In a lab setting this is pretty irritating, but I'm having second thoughts on recommending iMacs to our administrators. I hope this issue has been resolved with the newer models.

I just replaced my HD with about 2wks. left on Apple Care. Lost everything except the music which was on the iPod, whew. Seems like the late 2008 models HD's are going down, sad, Apple's quality used to be much better.

I bought an iMac 24" on the day they came out, and my 320GB Western Digital hard drive failed at the end of 2009. I let it sit there for a few months, and then brought it down to the apple store in April 2010. Same issue, failed HD. They replaced it with a 320GB Hitachi drive, which is working fine.

However, I have a ton of data on the failed WD, and the thing doesn't spin up at all. A friend suggested buying the same drive and replacing out the logic board; has anyone else tried this? I have years of files on that HD which unfortunately weren't backed up very recently (maybe a year ago).

Put me down for 4 in the last 3 weeks for a combined total of 5 in 60 days. I'm not going to say what needs to be said but when a hard drive does not out last the standard Apple Care program then Apple should be doing a recall of the drives in question.