[Rcovell]

My iMac's hard drive SMART status has been showing 'Failing' in red since at least last August. However, everything's been fine, except for an occasional bout with a series of 4 clicks, pause, repeat and the spinning colored beach ball. It passes and everything is back to normal. Disk Warriors hard drive monitor and the free SMARTreporter both confirm disk utilties 'Failing' hard drive, though.
I talked to an Apple certified tech at a local store and he said they could replace the drive under my Apple Care warranty, which still has about 9 months left on it.
He came by the house tonight and replaced the drive. I also had him bump my RAM to 1 G from 512.
He did load a fresh copy of the OS (Panther) and we used my SuperDuper! to clone back all my settings.
Everything seems to be working fine. All my updates are in place, along with my prefs and settings. However, the darn machine still can't spell worth a darn and I'm afraid I'll wear out the delete key before much longer!
Thanks to all on this forum who helped my understanding of this problem and their advice.
Bob. iMac FP 17" with 10.3.9 and 1G RAM