Well I’m glad I took out the three-year AppleCare Protection Plan. Over the last few days my iMac’s hard disk started making ominous clicking sounds when powering on, resulting in a flashing folder with a “?” icon appearing on boot (which can never be a good thing). Once it warmed up a bit, the drive would kick in OK, but from a cold start it was a no-go.

As the problems were mounting up – see my green pixel issue – I decided yesterday that it was time to call Apple tech support. On the whole, the phone call went about as smoothly as I expected. The Apple support staff do sometimes seem robot-like in their troubleshooting approach, and they treat you like it’s the first time you’ve seen a computer, but they were friendly enough. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, they eventually arranged for a local Apple service centre to send someone out to look at both the hard drive and green pixel problems. On-site service – fantastic!

Sure enough, a friendly chap arrived this morning with a new hard drive under one arm and logic board under another. Unfortunately he couldn’t fit the logic board (to fix the green pixel issue) as Apple had shipped him the wrong board, but he did at least swap out the hard drive. (Slightly terrifying seeing him take the iMac apart – not for the faint-hearted. Apparently though, the newer aluminium ones are even worse, involving suction cups and god knows what else.)

Once the new drive was in and the iMac’s guts put back in their place, we got the Leopard install under way. When done, it was simply a case of choosing an option to restore from my Time Machine backup:

Then I chose to restore everything from the backup (not quite sure why that red static IP address warning appeared, but anyway):

The installer then went about copying everything off my Time Machine drive (which took several hours). Amazingly, it went without a hitch – well, one small hitch, but I can live with it:

After clicking Continue a couple of times, up came the login screen. I logged in, and I was literally right where I left off before the repair man came round. All apps still installed just as I left them; all the files I checked present and correct; all my app settings exactly as before. Even Missing Sync appears to work. In fact the only annoyance was that it didn’t copy across my /etc/hosts file (which contains around 100 custom host entries), but this was easy enough to get off the backup drive. Maybe that’s what that red error message earlier was referring to.

So with minimal intervention on my part, the Mac is back up and chugging along nicely with its new drive. I must say, I’m impressed. I was questioning the reliability of Time Machine last month, but I have to say that today my faith in Time Machine has been fully restored. Fully restored. Geddit?

Thanks, I’ll be here all night…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Hardware, Mac OS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.