I woke up Monday morning and found my iMac completely frozen. Reseting the power resulted in a gray screen. Continuously gray, never moving on to display an Apple logo. Shit.

Popping in system DVD I am again staring a blank gray screen. Uh oh.

When I get home from work I pull the extra memory I added. No dice. Damn, this is pretty bad.

I try some of the Apple startup hotkeys to reset the pram, do an optional startup disk, and target the system as a firewire drive. Everything ultimately pointed a problem with the hard drive. What was most frustrating though was a hard drive problem really shouldn’t prevent OS X DVDs from booting.

My iMac is now out of warranty and I’m pretty certain the only thing I need to do is get to the hard drive to either reformat/reinstall the OS or replace the drive altogether.

So do I take it in to the Genius Bar, wait a few days for the repair or do I take the plunge and do the dirty work myself. I’m a former certified Apple technician. I can do this!

I take the plunge and crack it open. Not an easy feat but after 30 minutes I’ve extracted the hard drive and reformatted it on my trusty MacBook. Putting the iMac back together I power it on and low-and-behold I’m now able to boot off the OS X DVDs, run hardware diagnostics, and am back in business.

My triumph doesn’t end there though. I don’t even need to reinstall the OS. I just boot off the install DVD, select Restore from backup and in three hours my system is perfectly restored to where it was an hour before I awoke to find it dead on Monday morning.

Glorious day!

In case you didn’t know (and if you didn’t, really… what’s the matter with you?) it’s time for Steve Job’s magical keynote at MacWorld 2008! Expectations are high… on the horizon is a newer, thinner MacBook (SSD based possibly!) as well as the iPhone SDK, iTMS movie rentals, and AppleTV improvements. The lines started yesterday at noon and the magic kicks off this morning before lunch.

And of course, a personal note from FSJ:

Attention all conference attendees — due to a scheduling conflict we’ve had to push today’s ritual mass suicide up to 3 p.m. instead of 4 p.m. as it is listed in your program. Please take note of this and plan accordingly if you intend to participate.

UPDATE 11:16PST – Well, it certainly was a good morning! Everything I’d mentioned earlier was covered and though the new MacBook Air is certainly impressive, I’ll be waiting for a 2nd generation (1st time in a long time I’ve done that with an Apple product!) for improvements like SSD standard and a faster processor. Granted, a 1.8Ghz SSD-based system will run circles around a HD-based 2.0Ghz (my current MacBook) but I’ve become spoiled with my 2.8Ghz iMac. At the very least, Apple should be putting a 2.6Ghz duo core. Best guess is they couldn’t get the form factor they wanted on the chip, but they will… oh yes, they will.

OS X Leopard’s Finder does a crappy job of releasing file handles. There are lots of scenarios where file handles continue to remain in use long after an application/process has been closed. These leads to lots of ‘in use’ Finder errors at very odd and random times.

A quick way to close these stale file handles is to open a shell and use ‘lsof | grep <filename>’ to find the PID that still has it open. Once you have that, do a ‘kill -9 <pid>’ and you’ll close that handle and be able to proceed on with your action against the file.

It’s really annoying it does this. How does the Finder continue to get worse and worse with each release?

Today Apple releases OS X 10.5, or Leopard. I’m about 90min from having the download complete and have already run system backups to prepare for the upgrade. I tried a beta back in May/June and had a lot of luck with some of the newer features (Spaces being my favorite) but eventually rolled back due to application incompatibilities at the time. There have been reports all over the Net the past few days since it first starting creeping up on torrent sites. So far I’ve only seen two people reporting problems with their installs. Hopefully, I don’t become number three.