Hard drive fail (literally, it failed!)
Well, it all came to a head last night. The hard drive in my iMac gave up the ghost. Maybe not completely dead, but at least mortally wounded.It tried to boot but all I got was the spinning beach-ball of death after I logged on. Finder didn't even start. Though the hard drive was grinding away. After waiting for 10 minutes I gave up.At least something was still on the drive.Next I booted from the Snow Leopard DVD. Since you can't repair and FSCK a live filesystem you have to have something else boot to check (and hopefully repair) the drive. The install DVD is that thing.But it was no joy:
The S.M.A.R.T. status was the give away. If the drive tells you it's failing, it really is failing. Nothing you can do about it. (Just because it doesn't tell you it's failing doesn't mean it not though!)
I can't blame Apple for the drive failing. Hard drives are just commodity items that everyone makes. And since they are moving parts they break a lot easier than solid state hardware.
The fact that this is an Apple though leads to two different wins:
First off is target disk mode. When booting just hold down the "T" key and instead of booting the OS, you get greeted by a giant Firewire logo. I plugged in the MacBook and I was able to mount the drive. I have all of my irreplaceable data backed up, but some things lived only on my primary drive. (There's a fail for you!)
I was able to transfer all of that off without opening up the computer.
There's a win for you!
Next is Apple themselves. Or at least the Apple store.
I made a reservation this morning for 7PM. I arrived and checked in a few minutes before and right around 7 they called me.
Without even looking at the computer (I showed the same photo as above) he told me they'll take care of it. They have an appropriate drive in stock so I might get it back tomorrow even.
Considering that it's a Friday night that's faster than I would be doing it.
And I don't have to do it myself! That's a good thing since there's a lot of steps and I don't have suction cups.