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Model A1312 / Mid 2010 / 3.2 GHz Core i3 or 2.8 & 3.6 GHz Core i5 or 2.93 GHz Core i7, ID iMac11,3

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coloured fan wheel time out

my imac continually times out and the spinning coloured fan wheel keeps pausing the computer, have done update and deleted heaps of old mail, i missed out on the free offer to replace the HD from Apple as i was away,

is this related to hard drive issue, when fan wheel is spinning you can hear the computer humming/scratching/thinking,but there is nothing else running except the particularoperation i am perfirming at that moment

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You could have a a disk problem try running Apples Disk Utility application to verify the drive. To make repairs you will need to boot up under an external drive to allow the app to fix the drive. Make sure you have a good backup before doing this of all your important data.

The second issue you could be facing is a full HD the problem here is the OS not being able to find contiguous blocks to use. First see that you have at least 12 - 15% of free space. If not I would start by deleting as much junk as you can.

Even after freeing up space this freed space won't be in contiguous blocks this is where a defragmentation tool is needed. Sorry to say Apples Disk Utility doesn't do this, you'll need to get a third party tool like Drive Genius (which I use). In any case before you defragment your drive again make sure you have a backup of your files, then run Apple's disk utility from an external boot drive to verify and repair your drive in case you have some low level problems or use Drive Genius' drive repair tool.

As a side note: I defragment my personal HD's yearly and some of my offices drives get it twice yearly.

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Do not run Disk Utility from the drive you are trying to check. According to your system, you may be able to start up holding down the "R" key and run it (OS 7.5 & 7.8). You can also run it after booting from your system installation disk.

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john will be eternally grateful.
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