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Dead Hard Drive controller?

Hi there,

I have an iMac that one day booted up to the folder/question mark screen. I decided to try disk warrior which couldn't find the hard drive at all. Of course my first instinct was that the HD was dead so I decided to throw in a known good Hd that I had lying around. Turns out that that hd couldn't be found either. I could tell the Hd was getting power so I tried a known good sata data cable. Still nothing. Also I tried to put it in target disk mode but the fans just started blasting and the screen would stay black. I'm assuming that's what happens when there isn't a disk to be targeted.

Other things I tried was starting from a leopard dvd and using disk utility. No disk appears! An external usb drive showed up though after I plugged it in. I proceeded to try to install leopard to the external drive but it failed part way. Also I wasn't able to boot from the original disk after I pulled it from the machine and put it in an enclosure. It would not even show up as a startup disk! I started to suspect the logic board but a ran the ASD utility disc looped for 7 hours and the machine passed!

Could it be that just the connector for the SATA drive on the logic board is faulty? Anyone else had this problem?

Thanks,

Cory

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crwdns2934051:0crwdne2934051:0

yes ,

i think it's the logic board.thanks for your advice.

cory

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If you can't see a drive that was working or a known good replacement drive I would think you may have a logic board problem. Do you have another drive you can use to install a good OS on to see if the computer runs. If it doesn't I would think the logic board is definitely defective. Ralph

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He said he tried a known good internal drive AND an external drive (the internal didn't show up and the Leopard installer failed partway through an install on the external.)

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Definitely logic board, I concur with rj713.

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I'm hacing the same issue with my iMac at the moment too and we are thinking it's the controller. When we used a firewire cable to do a disk utility we could see the files on the HD but couldn't access them. We replaced the HG when another one I know was fine and we got it to completely reformat and install the OS again via firewire cable, but then it failed again when loading. Our guess is that the HD's are fine and it's the controller itself.

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Please post this as a separate question

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cory crwdns2934231:0crwdne2934231:0
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