Just as I was getting the hang of setting up this web site/blog, I suffered a major computer casualty, a geek’s worst nightmare. The hard drive on the iMac I use as my main computer “crashed.” It was working fine when I went to bed. But the next day when I sat down to work, my computer didn’t want to wake up. I finally did a cold boot, shutting off the power and turning it back on. There was the Macintosh equivalent of the Windows blue screen. I had never seen it before, a folder icon in the middle of a gray screen with a blinking “?” That was as far as it would go.
Up came the knot of fear. Upstairs I went to get my macbook and log on looking for help. The first suggestion was disconnect the peripherals and reboot. The next basic instruction was to try to boot from the install disk. When I did that, I knew this was worse than I thought. All I could see with disk utility was the install drive, not hard drive.
I stopped right there and called Apple. It turns out that my 3-year protection plan expired 3 days earlier, but since the computer had been in the shop during the last 3 months, getting another motherboard, I got an exception. We basically made the same attempts with the same results and Eric-the-tech made an appoint for me at the Apple store. This all happened Saturday.
Sunday I took the 24-inch iMac to the Apple store. I was hoping for a miracle. There was none. The tech there could not see the hard drive either. She said that Apple would honor my Protection Plan and replace the hard drive, but they would not give me the bad drive to take to a recovery service. I was about to go ahead with that, but I wanted to know if I could get a larger hard drive as a replacement. She said, you will get a larger drive a 320GB. But I told her that is what I had, I had ordered the upgrade.
That was the first time I heard that when you build your own computer by ordering the additional or upgraded components, those parts are not covered by the Apple Protection Plan, as they typically are not OEM parts.
She recommended taking it to an authorized repair shop. They could both put in a larger drive and attempt to recover the data on my old drive. I will do that today and keep my fingers crossed that I will luck out.
The irony of all this is that while most of my data files are not on my internal drive. I had not backed up my documents and email, in some cases, for several months. I had ordered a 2TB external drive a few weeks ago, but it never came and I had to cancel that order and order it from another company. It should arrive Tuesday. I had planned to do a full Time Machine backup when I got the drive.
So because I was trying to save money by ordering the drive from one place, it looks like I will be paying a much higher price now.
