the .: fyr :. light

So I am sitting here, working on my iMac on the 25th of June. I had only JUST migrated all my work stuff back from the Macbook to the iMac since it is a much better machine to work on when I can. I was just getting back into the groove of working with a desktop instead of on a laptop perched on my knees. I was trying to figure out the best way to keep info sync’d between them both and was working on a plan when “poof” the iMac display just froze.

No application was responding, I couldn’t get the activity monitor open to see what was hogging resources, I couldn’t force quit anything … in fact, I could do absolutely nothing. Which reminded me of the early lockups I used to have when I first got the iMac … you remember those days, don’t you?

So, with a sigh, I turned the iMac off at the power button, waited a minute and fired it up again. While I waited, I booted my work stuff up on the Macbook to at least let my boss know I was not suddenly gone out of rudeness, but that I had a bonafide tech emergency on my hands. While I am typing to him, I hear the iMac making some funny sounds, and I turn to see this icon show up in the middle of the grey boot screen:

Thanks for the image, UrbanTornado – hope you don’t mind that i borrowed it.

While my own monitor isn’t that large, the question sign in all it’s stark horror was just as memorable. Oh how I cried and gnashed my teeth. Then I thought of what my good friend DJ would have told me “load up your disk utilities from your install disk”.

That exercise told me what I already knew – hard drive, well and truly trashed. It gave me some hope by telling me that while the disk wasn’t repairable or recoverable, that a reinstall and restore would probably fix the problem

I was jubilant and proceeded to do as advised.

Ha! What a load of BS! The install stalled (heh) after about 2 minutes in to tell me that OS X could not be installed on the chosen volume because it was irreparable damaged. Ok, ok – so it didn’t quite put it that way, but that was the end result. My hard disk was well and truly DONE.

I panicked first … then while I sat looking at the iMac I had added to my shopping cart at store.apple.com and wondering how I was going to finance this purchase, the panic drained away and I remembered what else my friend DJ and I had been talking about quite recently – a hard drive replacement for the iMac. At the time, the idea was to get a bigger drive to facilitate not only my too-large photo collection, but to also be able to bootcamp with a sizeable enough partition to make Windows gaming a possibility.

So off to ifixit.com I went.

The idea was to find a 500GB or so drive. Well, fortunately or unfortunately, the smallest drive I could get for my iMac off ifixit.com was a 1TB.

Tears gone, panic departed, exuberance ensued … until I found out that it was going to take at BEST a week for this new drive to get to me.

To cut this already too-long story short, even when the drive arrived, I couldn’t put it in because I didn’t have the right tools. Apple uses some very odd screws to fasten their stuff in so I had to order those and wait another couple of days. Fortuitously, the tools arrived on Saturday and I was able to take apart my iMac, replace the hard drive, reinstall the OS and restore my stuff to just about the point at which I lost it on the 25th …

It took me about an hour with the guide off ifixit.com – which was quite good considering it isn’t the correct guide for my model.

I even got it right the first time around. Which is especially gratifying for me being that this is the first time I’ve been inside a machine with the intent to replace stuff in about … ooo – 4 years?

What’s even better is the fact that I am now bootcamp’d … with still too much space to fill on my OS X partition.

I am a happy camper again.

What would make me happier still?

A new camera to take picts to fill that space up with.

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