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Blinking Folder with question mark, no boot options working

Greetings,

My iMac went koo koo & I think the HDD may be bad. At start up, it immediately makes a series of "clicking" noises & eventually the blinking file folder with question mark appears. This is as far as it will go. I tried several reboot options during start up, all of which failed (Command "C", Command "S", Option/Command, and a few others). Can't even get a menu screen to try & fix anything. I rebooted from the installation disc & got it back working for ONE day, like nothing ever happened and now its doing the same thing again (blinking folder with "?". it clicks, then spits the CD back out at me, then the folder with "?" appears again. Is it salvageable?

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Usually when you begin to hear "clicking" noise from your Mac, its a sign of hard drive failure and I m sorry to say most tips, techniques even software fails to get this fixed. "clicking" gives you sense of physical damage to the HD which requires expertise technician to fix it. You also need to find out for data recovery services instead of software to recover your data from such hard drive.

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I agree your HD is probably shot. If it's tossing out the CD you might have upgraded the OS & EFI or have the wrong grey OEM disk... a commercial OS install disk should work. BTW Hold the option key down - don't also hold the command. Hold the shift key until you see the spinning gear, let up.

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shu ankh re will be eternally grateful.
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