diskectomy
my dad has an intel imac and he called me from the apple store thursday because the hard drive had died and he was wondering what his options were. the genius posse had quoted him $400 to ship it back and replace the old (250 GB) drive*, and they would absolutely not allow him to keep the old drive, on the off chance he wanted to take it to a data recovery place.
he was past warranty so I wondered to him why he was there in the first place. I googled it and it looked like a fairly painless procedure to swap the drive, so I told him I could do it for him. he dropped it off and I picked up a new 1 TB drive and a second, to make him a backup external drive. in the end, total cost was like $210, for basically 8x the space what apple quoted at half the price.
The hitch was, it turns out his model of imac is a bit different, and the procedure is slightly more complicated than what you would call painless. it's nothing like the drive swap I had to do in a 1st gen ibook (which involves drawing a map of the thing in several dimensions so you can label which screw goes where, and which uh, i never actually got to work again), but I noted that while putting together a PC these days is basically like playing with legos, working on a mac is always a little more like preforming surgery.
it appears to be a success though, and I'm particularly impressed because not only did I have enough weird micro tools and such to do it, with one exception I happened to have them all laying around in my bedroom. up to and including a random magnet such that I could magnetize my torx screwdriver for putting some of the screws back in that were exactly like playing the game operation, except instead of a buzzer, you lose by dropping the screw into the case and having to take it apart and start over.
anyway, that was fun.
* a new 250 GB drive goes for like, sixty bucks.
he was past warranty so I wondered to him why he was there in the first place. I googled it and it looked like a fairly painless procedure to swap the drive, so I told him I could do it for him. he dropped it off and I picked up a new 1 TB drive and a second, to make him a backup external drive. in the end, total cost was like $210, for basically 8x the space what apple quoted at half the price.
The hitch was, it turns out his model of imac is a bit different, and the procedure is slightly more complicated than what you would call painless. it's nothing like the drive swap I had to do in a 1st gen ibook (which involves drawing a map of the thing in several dimensions so you can label which screw goes where, and which uh, i never actually got to work again), but I noted that while putting together a PC these days is basically like playing with legos, working on a mac is always a little more like preforming surgery.
it appears to be a success though, and I'm particularly impressed because not only did I have enough weird micro tools and such to do it, with one exception I happened to have them all laying around in my bedroom. up to and including a random magnet such that I could magnetize my torx screwdriver for putting some of the screws back in that were exactly like playing the game operation, except instead of a buzzer, you lose by dropping the screw into the case and having to take it apart and start over.
anyway, that was fun.
* a new 250 GB drive goes for like, sixty bucks.