What is funny is that if the computer booted to safe mode, everything would be fine – no pinwheel, and no pixels or lines. However, when I took it to the Genius bar, they couldn’t get it to boot to their utility cd or safe mode.

They chalked it up to a bad video card, which they said means that I need a new logic board.

What do you think?

Regards,
Van

My only concern is its speed. Right now, my hard drive is running at 1.5 gigabits according to the system profiler (It’s an Intel ICH7-M AHCI hard drive, if that means anything to you). So what effect would installing a 6 gigabit drive have on the computer? Would it still run slower?

Thanks for taking the time to walk so many people through this process–I personally appreciate a lot of the knowledge you have imparted here.

Now, I’m also looking into finding a better video card to install… that’s a whole different pain in the butt. Do you perhaps have any suggestions for upgrades? I have the GeForce 7600, which isn’t bad by any means, but not sufficient for running programs with high graphic requirements. I realize it needs to be a card with an MXM socket… but I’m at a loss where to even start looking for one. Suggestions?

As for the $150 extra cost to install the OS – total ripoff. It’s 5 minutes worth of work, then the OS does the balance of the job on its own. To pay $150 for someone to hold down the option key for a few moments seems downright awful.

Good luck getting everything sorted out!

Jason

The apple store recently told me my 20 inch intel iMac hard drive failed. I purchased a new Western Digital hard drive from new egg.com. After reading your web page and having zero computer knowledge, I paid the local computer store to replace the hard drive. They asked me if I needed leopard installed and I said no thanks, I have the disk at home. Hmmm……got home, turned on computer to see a solid gray screen. So then I inserted the leopard disc turned the computer off and then on again with no success. I called the store back and heard crickets on the other end. They were not saying anything. The store told me they could not give me any technical support without paying an additional $150.00. They also said that I didn’t have the “equipment” I needed and would not elaborate! The guy did say one problem was my wireless keyboard/mouse. I am so frustrated I want to kick this iMac at them. Perhaps they could have told me that I wouldn’t be able to do this myself. In your other postings I didn’t see anyone complaining about this. Guess it is painfully obvious how non-techy I am. Can I do something myself or do I really need to drop another $150? Thanks for your help-
Jess

I had a HD go bad and replaced it doubling my storage capacity

My issue is that I can see the install CD and the new drive in Target Mode, but the screen is going Red>Green>Blue>White>black and cycling like that, I can’t get the OS installed

I am going to take it apart and double check the connections

Anybody have any idea what it could be?

If you purchased the BlacX drive dock and the WD hard drive (bare = no box, no cables, no baloney software CD, just the drive in an anti-static bag), you’ll have everything you need to connect the drive to your computer.

I’m glad you found the website helpful. I’ll post more stuff again soon.

Jason

Pretty much any 1TB hard drive will work, so long as it’s a 3.5″ SATA drive. Go to newegg.com and check out their hard drive section. SATA or SATA II are perfect. You really shouldn’t have any worry about heat from the drive inside your iMac.

As for a drive dock – yes, that would be very helpful, but not critical. Personally, I love my drive docks and would be at a major loss without them. It’s a great investment of $30 to $90, depending on the dock. USB are cheap, USB/FireWire/eSATA are 2-3x the price, but worth it in my opinion.

SuperDuper is really nice, but personally I prefer Carbon Copy Cloner. Po-tay-to po-tah-to.

Good luck!

Note on above discussion: Do not conclude that your disk is bad if it won’t boot. They have longer warrnties than the computer does. There is is a bug in some versions of OS Xthat allows a corrupt hard drive to prevent booting from CD, which several people reported. Unplug the hard drive and try again. To fix a G4 tower with this problem, I put the offending disk in an enclosure and plugged it into my Intel iMac, repaired it with Disk Utility, and then it booted just fine. The hard drive simply had some damaged files. So, Apple techs who tell you your hard drive is bad need to run Disk Utility first.

You can make a bootable utility dvolume if it is writable, like an external hard drive or flash drive, not a CD.

Thanks for getting back, but I’ve managed a bit more digging on the WD website, and they say they put in whatever they have in the parts bin at the time! A bit of a shocker, but I guess I’ll just have to open up the drive housing first and have a look.

cheers

nick

Jason

P.S. Check the RAM anyway.

Jason