Potential dead hard drive, iMac 27 Inch, Late 2009

Hi guys,

I was after a bit of advice...

I have a late 2009 27 inch iMac which I've owned since new. Just over a week ago everything was working as it should. I left the Mac asleep while I went away for the weekend when I went to awake it on the Monday evening the trouble started.

I was greeted with a locked up screen so I gave my machine a restart and ended up with the frozen screen with Apple logo and spinning gear. I took to the internet via my iPad and began troubleshooting.

I launched disk utility, verified and repaired the disk but got left with errors. I reset the PRAM, NVRAM and SMC. I tried to repair the disk in single user mode using fsck commands. None of these worked.

Originally when I entered disk utility the internal HDD was still being recognised as Mackintosh HDD. Now when I enter disk utility the drive isn't mounted (and won't allow me to mount it). It's now listed as disk0s2 and is give me missing thread errors.

Luckily I have Time Machine back ups on an external drive so hopefully all my data is safe.

Every time I go into the machine now it goes directly through to the language option and then to the utility menu (it doesn't matter what keys I hold down), I can't restore from Time Machine as my HDD isn't seen, I can't reinstall the OS either.

Yesterday I spoke to an Apple support engineer and ran through numerous checks to no avail. She concluded what I had already suspected the issue to be - my hard drive had failed. I had already scheduled an appointment with a 'genius' at the Regent Street Apple Store in London for next Wednesday.

Unfortunately as I live in the middle of the Big Smoke I don't own a car so I've got to rely on taxis to and from the Apple store to cart this badboy in to be told pretty much what I already know - the drive has gone.

I still have the original box for my machine as during it's first 3 years of life it spent more time off at AMSYS getting the display fixed time and time again than it did on my desk (yellow screen).

So I want to know if there could be any other issue other than the HDD failing. I would rather buy a new drive and fit it myself at home than take it into the store. I have a recognised Apple repair half a mile from my flat so that's another option.

During my extensive research into failed drives I have discovered that Apple launced a recall program for Seagate drives (of which mine is one) in late 2009 iMacs as they had the potential to fail. This was a few years back now but unfortunately I never received any notification from Apple regarding this. I've emailed them and am awaiting their reply. I had Applecare at the time so I would have been covered but I believe they were replacing drives for free anyway.

I'm hoping you guys can give me a few tips and let me know if this problem could be stemming from something other than the HDD.

I look forward to your responses.

Thanks.

.