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hard drive problems

Hi All,


I have a problem with the internal hard drive inside my iMac (27-inch, Late 2012) model. I have been on holiday for a few weeks and I came back a couple of days ago and booted up my Mac. It worked fine for half a day or so until it kept freezing and crashing. I had to reboot many times and when this happened the mac came up with the "You've had to restart because of a problem" screen.


Eventually it got to a stage where the computer wouldn't boot, I messed around extensively in Disk Utility, tried to boot in safe mode which failed, tried fsck to no avail. Ultimately I set up Yosemite on an external hard drive and, through that, I was able to use DiskWarrior to rebuild the Macintosh HD and, using the DiskWarrior preview, get some of my most important files and copy them onto my external hard drive's version of OS X.


The problem I am now faced with is to get back onto the internal hard drive's steam. When I used disk warrior to try and replace the directory it failed quoting error message "2166, 2351". I've since attempted to erase and reformat the drive inside using disk utility but I get the error message "unable to write to the last block of the device".


SMART status is verified.


How would you recommend I proceed? Is there anything I could do to fix the current drive or is it a case of needing to buy and fit a new one?


Any help is much appreciated.

Posted on Aug 6, 2015 8:30 AM

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Posted on Aug 6, 2015 8:39 AM

If you can run restart in the Recovery Partition by holding down Command +R on startup. Then launch Disk Utility there and attempt to repair the disk. If the disk reports errors after 2-3 attempts it should be replaced. If no errors appear, then exit DU and while still in the Recovery Partition reinstall OS X. Don't worry it is not an intrusive install, this means it will leave any data there however you should ALWAYS have a sound backup of all your data.


However you are assuming the Kernel Panic was caused by the HD, it may not be a HD issue. If you can get the computer to start and run normally post the KP log, you can find instructions for that in Mac OS X: How to log a kernel panic - Apple Support

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Question marked as Best reply

Aug 6, 2015 8:39 AM in response to Thomha Gold

If you can run restart in the Recovery Partition by holding down Command +R on startup. Then launch Disk Utility there and attempt to repair the disk. If the disk reports errors after 2-3 attempts it should be replaced. If no errors appear, then exit DU and while still in the Recovery Partition reinstall OS X. Don't worry it is not an intrusive install, this means it will leave any data there however you should ALWAYS have a sound backup of all your data.


However you are assuming the Kernel Panic was caused by the HD, it may not be a HD issue. If you can get the computer to start and run normally post the KP log, you can find instructions for that in Mac OS X: How to log a kernel panic - Apple Support

Aug 6, 2015 9:39 AM in response to Thomha Gold

The startup drive is failing, or there is some other internal hardware fault.

Make a "Genius" appointment at an Apple Store, or go to another authorized service provider.

If privacy is a concern, erase the data partition(s) with the option to write zeros* (do this only if you have at least two complete, independent backups, and you know how to restore to an empty drive from any of them.) Don’t erase the recovery partition, if present.

Keeping your confidential data secure during hardware repair

Apple also recommends that you deauthorize a device in the iTunes Store before having it serviced.

*An SSD doesn't need to be zeroed.

hard drive problems

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