Hi - have been the not so proud owner of a 24" 3.06ghz 2mb iMac for the last 3 weeks - not so proud cause in the first day i managed to lose all of the documents i had transferred to my external hard drive - user error - but saved 5 years worth of photos and movies- phew Anyway - the external hard drive i used for my transfer i then formatted as the back up drive for time machine and that has been where the main problems have been - every time i have it connected after a while or straight away my system hangs - sometimes it takes a while and i can even go into time machine and have a look at the last weeks stuff but other time it wont even get that far - then i see programs on the dock that i have tried to quit still have the blue light - but i cant open or quit or force quit - if i have got that far then i know it will then hang on the shut down and i have to press the big button. Last night i tried erasing the hard drive and then doing a new back up - after 3 hours it appeared fine. but this morning it went wrong again. I ahve tried it in different ports in the back of the Mac and a man from technical support told me to press 3 keys at the same time and get the double chime but that didnt work Today my hubby took the machine to the apple store for the genius guys to look - they did something in what i would describe as DOS mode (assume it wasnt) said ohhh there are errors we have repaired them - we then messed about in the store to try and recreate the problems with the external hard drove attached - there were no probs - i get home and they are back again -AAAHHHH Hubby says he will not 'lug that thing through a shopping centre again' i know it is only happening when the hard drive is attached and i am currently trying a new erase and back up with it set as MAC OS X case sensitive journaled - not sure what it does but read the words on macworld???? Any ideas - sorry it was long xxx
Have you tried using disk utility to check the external hard drive to make sure there's no problems? It sounds like there's something wrong with that particular Hard Drive. Have you tried using another external drive as your time machine drive and see if the problems go away? I want to help but I haven't heard of this problem and have never experienced it myself.