My iMac 2.5GHz Intel Core i5 running Lion 10.7.5 has been misbehaving.
Applications freeze intermittently, with spinning beachball, necessitating forced shutdown. Starting up stalls or generates spastic startup, again necessitating forced shutdown. Sometimes resting the iMac for 30+ minutes resolves the problem, sometimes not.
I ran HD Recovery which indicated that the disk is OK. Following that everything seems to be running normally.
Queries:
• Am I looking at momentary glitch(es)? Or is my hard drive in imminent risk of croaking? (I'm guessing that the very fact that I can access Recovery HD is an indication that the hard drive is functional.)
• If the latter, how does one go about replacing the hard drive?
• If one has to send it out to a repair facility (none in town), how might one protect the information on the drive from unauthorized access?
•If it needs replacing, will I be able to restore my previous system and files from Time Machine to get back to the status quo (ante)?
Depending on the answers to the above, I'll probably have numerous further queries.
Many thanks in advance for any and all assistance.
