iMac repair post #1

As promised, here is my first in a series of posts about our experience getting our beloved iMac fixed. We got our iMac in April 2008 off Craigslist from someone who was planning to get a Macbook instead. She originally bought it in the fall of 2007 and had bought an AppleCare extended warranty on it. Boy, am I glad she did -- and that the warranty was transferrable. (The seller was a paralegal and had carefully highlighted the clause authorizing transfers in the warranty agreement -- nice!)

After transferring the warranty online, I promptly forgot all about it. Until, of course, when the hard drive started acting funny last Friday. Since the original warranty had expired, I was sure glad we had gotten AppleCare. We don't usually buy extended warranties on our consumer electronics or computer parts, but this purchase turned out to be a good gamble.  (At the store while picking up my machine a few days later, I asked how much it would have cost to just pay out of pocket for the repair. The reply: $85 to troubleshoot, plus around $300 for the 320GB drive. Ouch!)

Sometimes we would see that question mark at boot time. Once or twice, I got the machine to boot, but it will take 10 minutes. "What is this," I thought, "a Windows machine?"  :-)

Next stop: Google. 

• I tried rebooting while holding down various keys down to reset the Mac's PRAM and NVRAM. No dice. 
• I tried booting from the Mac OS X installation disc which came with the machine to run Disk Utility, which "saw" the drive. I tried tried running Disk First Aid, which took about 15 minutes and failed halfway through its session. Uh-oh.
• The next time I booted from the OS X installation disc, Disk Utility didn't even "see" the drive. Double uh-oh.

Next station: AppleCare tech support. I called in Saturday morning.

The technician had me basically repeat the above. When that didn't work, he tried to have me boot from a utility CD-ROM which came with the AppleCare Protection Plan. It had TechTool Deluxe on it, a diagnostic utility, but it wouldn't boot for some reason. During one of our reboot-while-holding-down-the-option-key sessions, the Startup Manager launched and "saw" the drive.  So we selected it and the iMac got through about 1/3 of its boot sequence in 5 minutes.

At that point, we gave up, and the tech support rep made an appointment for me to take it down to my local Apple Store later that afternoon. It's nice that he was able to do this so I didn't have to.

Overall, the session lasted a little under an hour and would have been way better if (1) the phone connection had less delay (call center in India?) and (2) the technician  had listened more instead of just walking through his troubleshooting checklist without listening to what I had already done. Overall, I'd give them a B for the overall phone tech support experience.

  

Next post: the Apple Store repair experience.