Failing Hard Drive

[MindlessJD]

Hey all, got a couple of questions.

First of all, bit of back story - bought the iMac (27" i5) on 26/11 last year. Been absolutely perfect up until today. Woke up this morning to find it was very unresponsive, some applications had quit and the Finder wouldn't respond. I thought it was an abnormality so I hard rebooted it and carried on as normal.

Later in the day, sat down at the computer again to see an error -50 from iTunes saying it couldn't save a library file or something. Every time I clicked 'ok' it just popped up again. Then everything stopped responding again as before. Following a hard reset again, I thought to check disk utility and it shows the SMART status of my drive as FAILING.

I've booked a genius bar appointment for Saturday and hopefully they will sort everything out for me however;

a) I've installed an additional 4GB of RAM, now should I remove this before taking it to the Apple Store?

and

b) I have ALL my music/photos/documents backed up via Time Machine to my external drive - will I be able to restore all this safely (if they replace the drive with a new one) from just the Time Machine backup or should I make additional backups?

Thanks for any help!

 

[hfletcher]

b) Time Machine should be fine for restoring all of your files. Now that your internal hard drive is corrupt, I would recommend that you don't plug in your external one until it is fixed. I'm not sure, but I can imagine time machine doing a backup and somehow copying corrupted files accross, etc...

a) I don't think apple will have a problem about you having additional RAM installed. It's nothing to do with the hard drive, and personally I doubt they'd notice.

 

[MindlessJD]

b) Time Machine should be fine for restoring all of your files. Now that your internal hard drive is corrupt, I would recommend that you don't plug in your external one until it is fixed. I'm not sure, but I can imagine time machine doing a backup and somehow copying corrupted files accross, etc...

a) I don't think apple will have a problem about you having additional RAM installed. It's nothing to do with the hard drive, and personally I doubt they'd notice.

Awesome!

Thanks for the quick answer and advice. Disconnected the External Drive now and will leave the RAM in the machine.

Let's hope this gets sorted fast as I need my computer!