Last December I purchased to 20 iMacs from Best Buy, 1 for my wife and 1 for my son.
Saturday, my wife tells me hers is making a weird noise so I take a look at it. Its making a sound like a pc on a reboot cycle without any beeps, or chime. Bottom line, I unplugged it for a minute or 2 and I got it to boot and it lived for another minute or so. It was enough time for me to open my mouth wide enough to put my foot in while I was teasing my wife.
The screen came up with some double panic message. I was worried that it wasnt going to boot again, so I grabbed my iPhone and took a picture of the double panic error message. Tried the reboot again and I was back to square 1.
I called Best Buy and they told me that they couldnt help unless I had purchased their warranty, so I called an Apple store and talked with a couple of people there and they said that I would have to make an appt with the Technical Support Bar (I thought it was interesting he didnt use the term Genius Bar). I asked if they would be able to extract the data from a dead machine and his response was that they needed a bootable machine to do that. Heres the issue - I didnt want to leave my wifes broken iMac (containing all of her data, photos, etc) with the resident genius..
So, I went to Best Buy and purchased a SATA drive enclosure for $70, brought it home and carefully removed the hard drive from my wifes machine. I was correct in my assumption that the hard drive wasnt fried. I hooked it up and transferred her data to another drive and I plan on wiping out her original drive in re-installing it back in the iMac. I know that there are plenty of people out there that will say that I voided any warranty, but I would have to challenge them with the fact that there werent any stickers, or tape broken that would indicate that the machine had been tampered with.
With that accomplished, I feel that I am in a better position to leave the mac with them if they tell me it can be repaired (my wifes data isnt out there). Or if they send me home with a new iMac, I wont have to worry about getting the data out of the old one, who is looking at it, etc..
My point in writing this is to document my Apple experience with this issue. I am also on my 2nd iMac (I had the 24 with the screen fade). My experience with that return was quite pleasant and I hope that this return works out well too. One thing that does bug me though is that in a time span of 2 months, I bought 2 bad iMacs. Being a recent pc convert (I saw the light in spring of 07
), I have been touting the great things about macs to family and friends. In the past year or so Ive purchased the following:
Emac company auction purchase brought me into the mac fold
iBook held me together while I saved for the new iMac
iMac 24
iPhone 8Gb Sold it to a friend so I could get the 16Gb, then I gave that one to my wife so I could get the 3G
iTV
(2) iMacs 20 One of those is the one I speak of above
I hope that this works out and I will keep you posted!
Saturday, my wife tells me hers is making a weird noise so I take a look at it. Its making a sound like a pc on a reboot cycle without any beeps, or chime. Bottom line, I unplugged it for a minute or 2 and I got it to boot and it lived for another minute or so. It was enough time for me to open my mouth wide enough to put my foot in while I was teasing my wife.
The screen came up with some double panic message. I was worried that it wasnt going to boot again, so I grabbed my iPhone and took a picture of the double panic error message. Tried the reboot again and I was back to square 1.
I called Best Buy and they told me that they couldnt help unless I had purchased their warranty, so I called an Apple store and talked with a couple of people there and they said that I would have to make an appt with the Technical Support Bar (I thought it was interesting he didnt use the term Genius Bar). I asked if they would be able to extract the data from a dead machine and his response was that they needed a bootable machine to do that. Heres the issue - I didnt want to leave my wifes broken iMac (containing all of her data, photos, etc) with the resident genius..
So, I went to Best Buy and purchased a SATA drive enclosure for $70, brought it home and carefully removed the hard drive from my wifes machine. I was correct in my assumption that the hard drive wasnt fried. I hooked it up and transferred her data to another drive and I plan on wiping out her original drive in re-installing it back in the iMac. I know that there are plenty of people out there that will say that I voided any warranty, but I would have to challenge them with the fact that there werent any stickers, or tape broken that would indicate that the machine had been tampered with.
With that accomplished, I feel that I am in a better position to leave the mac with them if they tell me it can be repaired (my wifes data isnt out there). Or if they send me home with a new iMac, I wont have to worry about getting the data out of the old one, who is looking at it, etc..
My point in writing this is to document my Apple experience with this issue. I am also on my 2nd iMac (I had the 24 with the screen fade). My experience with that return was quite pleasant and I hope that this return works out well too. One thing that does bug me though is that in a time span of 2 months, I bought 2 bad iMacs. Being a recent pc convert (I saw the light in spring of 07
), I have been touting the great things about macs to family and friends. In the past year or so Ive purchased the following:Emac company auction purchase brought me into the mac fold
iBook held me together while I saved for the new iMac
iMac 24
iPhone 8Gb Sold it to a friend so I could get the 16Gb, then I gave that one to my wife so I could get the 3G
iTV
(2) iMacs 20 One of those is the one I speak of above
I hope that this works out and I will keep you posted!
