I have a long out of warranty/AppleCare iMac12,2 that meets me with an Apple logo and progress bar on boot, and after a few minutes simply shuts off w/o booting to the system. I did try running Apple Hardware Test, and it simply freezes 3 minutes and 27 minutes into the test, every time I run it.
Booting in recovery and running Disk Utility on the volume gave me the message: "Error: Disk Utility can't repair this disk.Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files."
From this point I did try booting in single user and running fsck and it met me with an error that it could not verify the disk and did not proceed beyond this point.
Obviously the hard disk needs replacing. Should I be OK just replacing the hard disk or should I be running other tests to make sure that there are no other issues with the computer prior to replacing the disk?
Thanks!
Best Answer
It doesn’t necessarily need a hard drive. Have you erased it and tried installing an OS?
You’ll need an external bootable OS for this on 2011 era hardware.
Only if you can’t get that working would you need a repair. A failing disk usually doesn’t cause shutdowns without logging a prodigious amount of IO errors and any technician should be able to read the SMART statistics to conclude the drive is malfunctioning or error free. If you need help locating a trained shop, try https://locate.apple.com
Best of luck with getting this repaired! (But only if it needs it)