said by bskuared :

Pucharsed my 24" iMac in early 2008. Yesterday I had a complete hard drive failure. Things started going south Wed night so I ran the disk utility and did a repair. Said all was well. I got up the next morning and things started locking up and well.... the rest is history.

Made an appt with the Genius guys, packed up the darn iMac and lugged it to the store. (sheesh, it was HEAVY, so I had to use one of those luggage cart thingies - definitely not a pack and carry item!)

They confirmed hard drive failure. The good news is they have the part and can fix it. The bad news is I have to wait a couple of days.

So for now, using the macbook.

The real question I have here is is this normal for a disc to fail on an iMac after only 1 year of use? Seems a bit extreme to me. I'm lucky because I'm a nut for redundancy and have everything backed up on an external hard drive using Time Machine and as well as another external hard drive for critical files. BUT, the failure of such a new hard drive seems ridiculous. Thoughts?