No shocker, he got the same answer I did: You're screwed, David Carnoy, you should have bought AppleCare.
He went to the same Web page I had visited earlier and input the serial number just as I had. He said, yes, that was right, but he wanted to check my serial number anyway and enter it into the Apple system to see if it was eligible. I told him my model was a 2010 model and that the recall was limited to 2011s. Did I have the machine's serial number handy? (Note: I hadn't brought said machine because lugging around a 27-inch iMac isn't all that easy.) As expected, the first thing he mentioned was that some hard drives in certain models were eligible to be replaced. I kind of knew what the outcome would be - I had not bought AppleCare, so I was screwed - but I do enjoy chatting with the geniuses.ĭiskWarrior goes to work rebuilding the directory, so I can save my data (click to enlarge).Īs usual, the Genius was cordial.
(I could have attempted to reformat the drive, but the tech support guy for DiskWarrior said that even if I was able to do that, he didn't think the drive would be reliable.) For the heck of it, I thought I'd make an appointment and head over to my local Genius Bar. Once I'd completed the backup, I now was ready to tackle the problem of replacing the drive. I was able to preview the drive and start copying over the data to an external hard drive. And then, some 10 hours after I began the process, it was over. In the morning when I woke up, it was still spinning and sputtering. I left the machine spinning and sputtering overnight. It was a 1TB drive with lots of bad sectors. I sent DiskWarrior into battle at around 11 p.m. There are more, even more-powerful data-recovery utilities, but DiskWarrior had received favorable reviews on CNET and elsewhere, so I figured I'd give it a shot. The good news was the program could at least see the drive (it was mountable) and therefore could, in theory, help me access what was on the drive.
I turned to a $99 program called DiskWarrior, which told me my hard drive was in seriously bad shape. Unfortunately for me, the recall was limited to some 2011 models - a year after my iMac. I had backed up most of its contents to a network drive, but I did have some family photos from the last three months that I hadn't backed up and wanted to save.Ī bit of Googling led me to the discovery that Apple had actually recalled some iMacs thanks to a batch of "bad" Seagate 1TB drives. When good disk drives go bad: The message you don't want to see (click to enlarge). "Back up as much of the data as possible and replace the disk." "Your drive has a hardware problem that can't be repaired," the warning message read. It wasn't exactly dead, but it was on life support. I'm normally pretty good about fixing these things and I'm well versed in using Apple's Disk First Aid. Truth be told, I was happy with my iMac purchase - until the hard drive failed on me last month, around 22 months after I'd bought it.
Except for my work laptop (a Lenovo), I'd built all my Windows machines and they were much more powerful than anything I had on the Mac side. And just so this doesn't devolve into an argument about Mac versus Windows machines, at the time of the purchase, I had more Windows machines in my house than Macs. The guy next to me was buying a fully loaded Core i7 version for his daughter, who was headed off to college.įor the record, I was replacing a 2003 "Quicksilver" Power Mac G4 that had grown long in the tooth but still worked with one hard-drive replacement along the way and a few memory upgrades. Whatever it was, in the summer of 2010, when the iMac line got upgraded with new Intel processors, I walked into an Apple store and plunked down close to two grand on a 27-inch Core i5 model with some extra RAM. I'd like to blame it on an Apple ad campaign - or the cumulative effects of multiple Apple ad campaigns - but I think it had more to do with me briefly playing around with the review samples that made their way into our labs year in and and year out and rationalizing that the sleek, space-saving iMac would make a good hand-me-down computer for my kids when they were old enough to use one. I can't say I've ever been a huge fan of all-in-one PCs, but a few years ago I was seduced into buying an iMac.