My iMac is broken

[Overdose]

6 Hours and 26 Minutes? Sweet Jesus! :O

 

[John Duncan]

It was more like three to be fair. But I hate leaving things like that running overnight only to wake in the morning and find it's failed or gone to sleep or whatever, so I blogged it up...

www.whathifi.com/blog/replace-the-hard-drive-in-your-imac

 

[chebby]

Just found this article John...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/14/imac_hard_drive_replacement_woes/

...is everything ok on yours post replacement?

 

[Anonymous]

Time Machine can be used for on-demand backups; simply right click the dock icon and choose 'back up now'. There is no need to keep the disk attached.

 

[John Duncan]

Just found this article John...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/14/imac_hard_drive_replacement_woes/

...is everything ok on yours post replacement?

It's fine, yes. When I enquired with a service centre about them doing the work, he did ask model number so that he could identify whether it was a normal hard drive or whether it needed "a specific apple one with temperature control built in" and was told it was just a normal one, which seems to be the case since mine had the stick-on temp sensor and is showing no ill effects.

 

[Andrew17321]

Finally got round to putting a new hard drive in - delayed by 'flu. Much easier than taking the iMac to bits - took less than an hour to put together again. Started perfectly! I have installed LinuxMint rather than apple software - again went very smoothly.

(This was my wife's iMac. It was over six years old when it died, so rather than have it 'officially' repaired she bought herself a new one: bigger screen, bigger hard disc, four times the memory, Lion software etc. I got the broken one to play with. I also have her old mobile phone and her old her old iPod nano. Well, I am old, 70 in just over 3 hours.)

Apple certainly does not make it easy to repair their stuff, but it is possible with patience, a lot of bad language, and an occasional extra hand.

Andrew

 

[Ravey Gravey Davy]

Well, I am old, 70 in just over 3 hours.)

Wow- so much life in such a short space of time.

Enjoy your birthday- and look forward to the next 70 by 3.00am.

 

[ifor]

For backup software consider Crashplan. It's free and as well as backing up to an external HDD you can backup remotely to a friends computer.

I've given up relying on single external HDDs for backup having had too many fail on me. I now use a Drobo, which has capacity for 4 x 2TB HDDs. Everything is mirrored so a disc failure is no problem and it's TimeMachine and Crashplan compatible. If I were buying again I would get the 5 bay NAS version.