Tearing apart a 24" Aluminum iMac

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!