I'm just recovering. I'll be okay, it certainly could have been worse. I lost a little sleep and was quite stressed for several hours but everything is starting to settle back into it's old situation.
My new iMac G5 crashed. Crashed big time. I was in the middle of doing something with iDVD when I got the spinning colour wheel. It spread to other applications and the Finder. I couldn't force quit, nothing. I watched it for a while, hoping with all hope that it would come back to life but, alas, no. It was not to be. This has happened before. A little too frequently recently, causing my wife to question me about the possibility of a virus or something attacking my beloved iMac. No, that's just not possible, I said. Anyway, when faced with this problem before I've simply just restarted and kept on going on my merry way. Not this time.
After a hard restart. I got the normal start up screen with the grey Apple logo. The circle dial spun for what seemed like an eternity, then the screen turned blue and the circle spun for what WAS an eternity. I tried a couple more restarts to no avail. Now I was getting a little concerned so I quickly hopped on my other computer and hit the Apple Support site, as I find the Discussions section usually quite helpful. However, due to system maintenance searching was somewhat disabled, so I had to scroll through pages of posts looking for something similar to my problem. After a while of this I tried some of the standard support FAQs and tips. I tried them all, including starting up into "Single User Mode" and resetting the PRAM. Each time I restarted with the hope that Apple Support would bail me out. Nope.
Ah ha! A brainstorm. When I first got the iMac I had an issue with...I can't remember what it was now...but I used the online chat with a support agent thing and my problem was solved! I'll try that again. I click on the appropriate link and enter my Apple ID and...oh oh... they want the serial number. Okay, back to the iMac. If you don't know, the serial number is located on the bottom on the brushed aluminum stand that the computer is mounted on. So I carefully inverted my computer and attempted to read the serial number. The serial number is printed in quite small printing, in white on a grey background. I don't know if it was because I was staring at a computer monitor for so long or what but I could not, no matter how hard I tried, focus on the printing. As my arms were tiring I finally managed to hold the numbers at just the right distance to allow me to get a pretty good idea at what they were. I jotted them down and headed back to the other computer to try chatting with an agent. After filling in the online form I click on the "Chat with agent" button only to be told that I wasn't able to use that service since my 90 days had ended. If I really wanted to chat with a support agent I could buy an extended AppleCare warranty for upwards of $300 or pay a "per incident" fee of around $60. I opted for neither and went on to try something else.
I figured I could reinstall the system. That would be okay. No data loss. Archive and install I think they call it. So I got my install discs out and booted them up. I was quite shocked when I got to the part where they ask which hard disk you want to install the OS and there was only a picture of my external firewire drive! What happened to my hard drive? Huh? I found the Disk Utility in the menu of the Install disk and ran that. It said the Maxtor drive was there but the volume 'Macintosh HD' was all grayed out. I tried mounting the drive to no avail. I tried repairing the hard drive...error. This hard disk cannot be repaired, it said. My blood pressure was rising a little at this point and my brain was reeling. What do I do now? I was tempted to phone my brother who is quite knowledgeable in these matters and might know some magical UNIX command-line spell that would somehow tell the computer that I really do have a hard drive with OS X on it, but being that it was near midnight I figured I'd best just shut the computer off and leave it until the next day.
I didn't sleep well. I was running scenarios through my head. For you see, that same day I had visited my parents house and was working on my Dad's computer and his external firewire drive exhibited the exact same problem as my primary drive. Disk Utility could find the drive but not mount the volume and couldn't repair it either. Since it was only a backup drive I wasn't concerned with erasing it and starting again but did I really want to do that with mine? Would it work? Also, it being the Labour Day weekend and all, if the problem was hardware, the earliest I could take it in to be fixed would be Tuesday. Did I want to be without my beloved computer that long? When was my last backup? When did I backup my wife's account last? How much data could I potentially lose? These questions and more kept me awake for quite some time.
Skip ahead to Sunday and I hook up the External firewire drive to the working Mac just to see the status of my backups. Luckily, well not really luckily since I'm pretty diligent about backing up important stuff, my copy of ChronoSync had indeed backed up both accounts the previous night. So now I'm faced with a dilemma...do I try erase and start over or wait to take the computer to a professional?
Being that I wasn't even sure if the hard drive was working properly, I thought I should try to erase. If Disk Utility can't fix the volume maybe it can't erase it either and that, I figured, would indicate a hardware problem. So I bit the bullet and tried it. It worked! It worked! I LOST ALL MY DATA!! YEAH!!!
After about an hour to install the OS and run Software Update about 3 times to make sure everything was up-to-date I was ready to begin the task of returning all my data back to it proper place. Well, not just my data, but also my wife's and I had to recreate my son's account. All told, it took about 3 more hours. I'm actually still not done yet, however, it is now once again close to midnight so I'm going to sleep.
At least I'll sleep a little better tonight.