Future Tech Systems

Hey folks – Chris the owner here.

My Fiance’s iMac decided that it wanted to stop working this weekend.  Now, keep in mind, I am primarily a Windows/PC technician, but I am not your typical “Everybody should own a PC and not a Mac” type person.  There are people who like Macs, and people who like PCs, and there are pluses and minuses to both.  That being said, we have had this particular iMac for 3 years almost.  It was a Christmas gift for her.  On December 26th, the original hard drive died.  So, we brought it to the store, and eventually after much discussion and debate, they discovered that yes, a hard drive making a clicking noise and not booting up was in fact a dead hard drive.  So they replaced it.

Now, here we are less than 3 years later, and her computer starts going incredibly slow, and refusing to open Adobe Illustrator.  She is a graphic designer, so aside from a web browser, this is the most important thing on her PC.  I initially thought some Adobe update broke it, as their updates frequently refuse to install (on both PCs and Macs).  So, as I’m looking at it, I notice things like, oh, I don’t know, a 10 minute wait time to open the web browser, etc.

Long story short, I did some digging, and a program called OnyX which is a maintenance type piece of software (you can get it free from download.com) says I need to boot from the OSX install disk and run the disk utility.  (Hint: You can go to Apple menu->System Preferences->Startup Disk after inserting the CD to do this, or you can power the computer off, back on, and hold down the letter “C” on the keyboard after you here the “BONG!”) Guess what?  Disk utility says there’s a problem that it can’t fix.  So I go through some more hoops, do some googling, and decide to go to the local Apple Store for help picking out a drive utility.  I have to be honest – the Apple Store on a Saturday afternoon is not where you want to be.  To say it’s busy is an understatement.  So, I asked one of the salespeople which disk utility would work best, and asked if they could go ask one of the “Geniuses”. (I know, I laugh every time too) So, the sales rep honestly tells me this, that they are too busy, but if I go online I could read reviews of which software would work best.  This was extremely helpful – apparently there is this thing called the Internet!  Oh well – at least he didn’t say “All we have is what’s out there”.  But I digress.  So, after seeing other people online with the same sort of issue as me, some sort of Invalid Node error, everyone kept mentioning DiskWarrior.  So, rather than spend my hard earned money at the Apple Store, which its true, all they have is what’s out there, I bought it direct from the manufacturer for $99.

The nice thing about DiskWarrior, from a PC tech point of view, is that the disk is bootable.  So basically, same routine, put the disk in (after getting the OSX disk to eject, which involved holding down the Eject/Load button on the keyboard for an inordinate amount of time – Mac doesn’t trust you with a physical eject button because it might be too complicated for you to understand!) hold down the letter “C” on the keyboard until it gives you the twirling circle deal under the Apple logo, and you’re in.

It then scans your disk for problems and attempts to rebuild broken directories.  If you have a simple problem, I’m told this process runs in about 30-60 minutes.  Being that my drive is physically malfunctioning, I’m currently at 48 hours and counting.  It says underneath the progress bar “diskwarrior speed reduced by disk malfunction”.  After some more googling, and checking DiskWarrior’s website, this can take 1-4 days, and ask long as you can still move the mouse, it’s still allegedly recovering data.  I am told that once this process completes, we will be able to copy recovered data elsewhere.  I purchased a 500 GB external hard drive for the very reasonable price of $69.00 from Costco – it’s made by Seagate.

Stay tuned – when it finishes, I will post a continuation of this article on recovering the data.  I will also be replacing the 250 GB hard drive in it with a new 500 GB sata drive – so you will all get to see what the guts of an iMac look like.