Yesterday night the hard drive of my 2011 iMac decided to go south. One minute I was testing Yosemite booting on an external drive, the next I rebooted on Macintosh HD, got on the gray screen a progress bar that took forever, and the Mac turned itself off. Rebooting on an external drive again, Macintosh DH appeared in Disk Utility, but could not be repaired, mounted or erased.
Now I have to take the iMac to Apple for repair. Would you believe my AppleCare contract will expire at the end of the month ? Phew. A couple weeks more, and the self destructing hard drive would have been out of coverage. Maybe the little timer in the machine malfunctioned ?
I must sing the praise of Carbon Copy Cloner which permitted to boot again on a perfect external copy of Macintosh HD right away and keep all my data. After all, hardware can be replaced
In 3 weeks time, 3 harddisks crashed in my systems: a MacMini server (2 500GB disks) of which the systemdisk went haywire, and in a ioMega NAS both 1 TB disks crashed 2 weeks after each other. I noticed strange sounds (tac…tac…) indicating problems but it happens always unexpected. Replacing the disks in the MacMini is quite a surgical operation…
Murphy’s law is such that I did not have any sounds prior to the sudden death. And I contemplated changing the drive myself, which I would have probably done if out of AppleCare coverage, but in spite of my electronics training, I do not enjoy anymore prying Apple devices entrailles. I must have become a software man
I also have a 2011 iMac and I have had it repaired multiple times. The screen, video card, motherboard. I have a practically brand new one after so many repairs. AppleCare paid for itself several times over. My warranty expires in August.
The disk on my late 2009 iMac failed while it was still covered by AppleCare. I have since passed it on to someone else in the house and bought a new one (late 2013) with a SSD - Which I HOPE is less likely to fail!!!.
In any case if the late 2009 iMac falls I would still want to get it fixed… How much did apple charge you for the repair?
my 2011 iMac hard disk died last month after having problem for a week before the death seeing “disk0s2:I/O error” on my console log.
I have many backup for all my development project and time machine backup. after i bring it to the authorised apple people replace the hard disk since it is just within the warranty period… just got one month left then.
anyway, i try to restore the whole system during boot up from the time machine restore but it does not work for some reason, i have to start all over again from the restore of time machine but folders by folders and only things i really need.
[quote=99364:@Karen Atkocius]
In any case if the late 2009 iMac falls I would still want to get it fixed… How much did apple charge you for the repair
karen[/quote]
I’ve replaced the HDD with an SSD in mine too.
Don’t really remember but it was about 6.500 SEK or something. I only had to pay 1.500 though. My home insurance covered the rest
Luck of the draw. I have a 2006 MacPro that runs 24/7 and still has the original 250gig HD in it. When I retired it to run as a backup server and replaced it with a 27" iMac, the remaining drives were re-purposed from the Pro to an external cabinet on the iMac…
With no failures in those drives in 8 years so far (now watch they will all fail later this afternoon)
[quote=99381:@Dave S]
With no failures in those drives in 8 years so far (now watch they will all fail later this afternoon)[/quote]
Start the count down
The MacMini (2009) with 2 Hitachi 2.5" disks only showed a day prior to the failure a very long boot sequence, so I started to check the drive’s health but it was too late… All the crashed diskdrives were about 6 years old, runing 24/7.
