high-pitched whining coming from eMac

You can check Disk Utility for your hard drive's SMART status, since an intermittent high-pitched noise is one classic symptom of a hard drive's bearings giving out. Then again, the same sounds can be due to dust unbalancing one of the fan blades, or noise pickup by poorly shielded external speakers, or a host of other innocous reasons. Keep your key data backed up (which yo'd do anyway, right?) and keep an eye on the SMART status, maybe run Disk Utility/ Verify disk to check for disk errors, but unless there's a further symptom I wouldn't worry too much about it. If the sound sudednly becomes strong or changes dramatically, that'd be a cause for concern.

With OS X 10.3 as shown in your profile, SMART staus should show up at the bottom of the Disk Utility window while booted normally from the hard drive. Refer to Getting information about a disk or volume and Replacing a disk before it fails

Patrick,

Good catch on the possibility that the noise is from the CRT. Such coil noise doesn't necessarily have any obvious correlation to what's on the screen so it'd certainly appear intermittent.

I've found that changing the "refresh rate" of the CRT in the Dispay system prefs makes the high pitch go away.

Hi !

I've got the same problem with my new emac. The high-pitched noise lasts only 30 seconds and never comes back until the next cool starting up. I suppose it's a trouble linked to the temperature of a component in the emac.
What have you done te solve the problem ? Do you need to repair it ?

Olivier

[edited by Apple Discussions moderator]

It's not the hard drive.
It's the CRT's electron gun.
There were several threads on this about a year ago but Apple removes them from the discussions serever after some time.

It happens about 5 or 10 minutes after the eMac is first started up or after it awakes from deep sleep mode (sleep mode must be entered automatically, not by the apple Menu command).

The noise goes way when you change your screen's resolution in System Preferences > Displys, right?
Then it's not your hard drive.

One or two people here have said that they convinced an Apple service center to replace the CRT under warranty.
Some people haven't been so lucky.
My warranty's almost up so I'll be taking my eMac in soon. What a drag.

listen, i had the same problem, i took it to a private apple serviceman here in town after staying on the phone with apple. apple had me do everything from erase my HD (several times) to take it in. they wont let me ship it back becasue of the size, i even took it to a serviceman at compUSA. fact of the matter is....noone knows this specific problem..they will give you a thousand solutions...my personal fav was that i couldnt use it by a window because the window sill was aluminum and it caused a magnetic field, yah, not as much as the system itself.

my solution was to sell it on ebay, it was excrutiating sitting in my dorm with this noise doing graphic design. I sold it for enough to buy a mac mini and a monitor....BEST THING I EVER DID....ive had an emac, an ibook and i bought my GF an ibook, but nothing compares to my mini, i just love it flat out, no problems and no icky CRT, but you can always buy a nice crt for it if you prefer that. trust me, youll get a THOUSAND solutions, but no corrections.

10/31/2005

I finally took my eMac in last week to have them fix the high pitched squeal (under warranty). I fully expected them to tell me that they heard no problem and that I was stuck. But they did hear it, and they agreed that it was a problem with the CRT. They suspected it was the CRT's power supply but since it all comes together in a single unit they replaced the entire CRT.
I've been using it for a couple of hours now and so far so good, i.e. no more high pitch noise.

Kudos to Apple and to CPUsed's repair shop (my apple dealer in Toronto).

All is well in eMacland.