Borderland

It’s been a while since I’ve had a tech story to tell. This one ends OK, but it wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped it would be – as if that ever happens.

Last winter our family’s 2006 era iMac began crashing repeatedly, losing the kids’ unsaved English papers and generally pissing us off when the colorful “wheel of death” announced that whatever we thought we were doing was not going to happen. There was also a clicking sound that accompanied the death wheel, which (to me) suggested that it was a hard drive problem. I mentioned to Amy that we could get a new computer with some of her art studio money, since her business requires a computer for various things. She thought that was a great idea. What a gem! The hard drive may have been damaged, or maybe it was crammed too full of music and video files; I didn’t know. My son is publishing snowboarding videos now, and everyone has a pile of music and photos. When we bought it, 256 gigabytes seemed like a lot of storage, but the new computer holds 4 times that.

While I was waiting for the new machine to arrive via FedEx, I looked into what it would take to replace the hard drive on the old one. Emboldened by a YouTube video demonstrating a 17″ iMac Hard Drive Replacement, I went ahead and ordered a new drive from an online distributor. I especially liked the opening sequence in the video where the guy demonstrated unplugging the computer. Right there I knew this was going to be aimed at my skill level. Before today, I’d never taken the cover off a computer.

After the new computer came and I got all the files moved onto it, I zeroed out the hard drive on the old one and re-installed everything. It ran fine, confirming my suspicion that what was wrong with it was that it was simply too full. This left me in the position of having to break my “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule. The new hard drive cost 26 bucks to ship to Alaska, and I wasn’t going to pay more to send it back.

Getting the cover off the computer was easy, and so was taking the cover off the fan. Then I was supposed to disconnect three wires from the hard drive. The 2 on the inner-most side of the drive came off easily. I just pulled the connectors away from the drive, and they came right off. But the other one near the outer edge of the computer wouldn’t come loose, and I couldn’t even see how the connector worked. This was something I’d worried about beforehand. I did NOT want to muscle the thing off and tear up some delicate little piece of plastic. That wire was connected to the metal housing that holds the drive in the computer, and not to the drive itself. Maybe it didn’t need to come off, I thought. That was GOOD IDEA #1. There was no connection at all on that part of the new drive. The cable was connected only to the metal band that secured the drive to the computer, so I left it alone and unscrewed everthing, leaving the wire attached. It was long enough to get the job done without any trouble. But I did need a pair of tweezers to retrieve some screws that dropped into hard-to-reach places inside the computer.

When I got it all back together and turned it on, the installer program did not “see” the hard drive. This was a major glitch. I didn’t know if the drive was bad, or if I’d messed up that little wire by tugging on it. I put the old drive back in to see if it worked (It did.) and then I took it out and put the new one back in after a bunch of Googling to see if there was information about this problem online. What I learned was that the installer script needed me to “format” the new drive with a program on the Mac called Disc Utility.

I’d already looked at Disc Utility, though, and there wasn’t a Format option. I opened up Disc Utility from the Utilities menu on the installation disc and – for kicks – I clicked on the Erase tab. The Erase option was available. Lacking any better idea, I “erased” this brand new hard drive. Wonder of wonders, a message in the dialog box announced that the computer was partitioning the drive. I have no idea what that was about. After that, still operating on desperation, I decided to click Repair Disc. Amazingly, it ran a “repair” sequence and listed several things that it did, ultimately declaring the drive to be in proper order.

And it was. The installer script recognized the destination disc, and I had a beer while I watched the progress bar show me the system being re-installed. It took me over 3 hours to accomplish what the guy in the video did in 5 minutes.