I’m back in business.
For those of you that didn’t know (can’t image no one knew this) my two year old iMac’s internal hard drive (HDD) died last week. Luckly during Spring Break I had time to off load lots of files and pictures to external drives and (re)start my Time Machine Back ups for my internal HDD.
I’m glad I did.
On Thursday of last week my iMac was sluggish and I put on my tech hat and began to diagnose the problem. After four hours, I threw in the towel. I tried more on Friday but to no avail. It was time to call Apple.
Saturday morning I dailed Apple Tech support and the call went something like this…
“Hi Todd, I’m having some issues with my iMac. Yes, here is my serial number and phone number to contact me in case we get cut off. Ready? Okay, I’ve tried, this, this and this. Then I did this and this with this disk and while we were on the phone, I did this. Still not booting up.”
A 3o second pause on the line as I swear I could hear him flipping through pages…
“Well Mr. Saldivar it looks as if you’ve tried/done everything I would have walked you through, seems to be a hardware problem, lets get you an appointment to take it to the Apple Store.”
“Thank you Todd.”
An hour later the Apple Genius at the Apple store confirmed my suspisions. Hard drive was dead. Three to five days to replace – AppleCare would take care of the costs. I touched my hand to my lips and then placed it on my iMac as it was lead away. I would have to work from my 13″ MacBook for a couple of days.
On Wednesday of the next week I picked up “my baby” from the Apple Store, came home, plugged in the power cord and most importantly hooked up my 1TB LaCie external drive that had been doing those important Time Machine Back ups.
I crossed my fingers, did the sign of the cross then had a few shots of Scotch while I watched as the blue light flickered constantly on the external drive…slowly beginning to breathe life back into my iMac…
In 2.5 hours Time Machine had restored my iMac to it’s original state – all documents, applications and user settings.
My reaction was like when Dr. Frankenstien successfully created life! Hence the picture above.
My life is all about movies…
I didn’t have to reload ANYTHING. God I love Time Machine.
Thank you Jonathan Marcus for telling me to buy a LaCie drive.
Thank you Jim Cornell for calming me down.
Thank you American Express for extending my AppleCare an additional year since it would have run out on March 9, 2012.
Beto
PS – to get the full effect of my experience see the video below:
At least it wasn’t the motherboard, at least that’s what we PC users call it. So, I experimented with a Mac Mini to see what all the Apple hoopla was about and 2 years later the motherboard went out. The “Geniuses” told me it would cost $500 to replace something I could do myself on a PC for half that…never again. Needless to see we are back to being PC users, but I build and repair my own.