Hey everybody. I'm a long-time lurker on these forums, and fortunately I've never had a computer problem that I wasn't somehow able to deal with myself. Until now...
I'm posting in this forum because I have a feeling that its a hardware problem. I have a revision B iMac G5 running OS 10.4
Anyway, so last week I was downloading a torrent overnight. When I woke up in the morning, my computer was frozen. I force-restarted my computer, and it failed to boot (showing me that horrible blinking-questionmark-on-a-folder image.) I restarted a couple more times, and the same thing happened.
I decided that since I didn't have anything important on the drive, I'd wipe it clean and reformat it. I tried this, but it froze halfway through installation. I tried it again and it worked. After this successful installation, I restarted my computer and it brought me to the desktop. However, within a couple minutes my computer froze, and when I rebooted it again showed the blinking question mark.
Then I booted up with DiskWarrior, but it failed to recognize the hard drive. I restarted my computer again and for some reason DiskWarrior recognized my hard drive this time. I ran the program, and it didn't find anything wrong with the drive. Disk Utility says the same thing.
So now basically what happens when I turn on my computer is either a) it fails to start up and shows the blinking question mark or b) it begins to start up, shows the blinking question mark for a couple seconds, but then resumes start up as normal, only to crash several minutes later once I start using the computer. Sometimes DiskWarrior and my OSX system disk can recognize the hard drive when I boot up from the DVDs, sometimes they cannot.
Does anyone know what the problem could be? I'm assuming there's something wrong with my hard drive. Is there any way I can be sure, so I don't have to pay money to get it professionally checked out? Would there be a way to fix this problem?
Thanks a lot for any help you can give, your insight is greatly appreciated!
Cheers,
Bryn
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