Just got my new iMac today (I'm a switcher). Turned it on and went through setup. Then, when I got to updating the date and time, the little colored wheel just went around and around for over 8 minutes. I then turned it off. Bad call I guess, because when I rebooted, just a grey screen. I spent some time chatting with the Apple support guy in Bangalore, tried to reinstall and/or run the disk utility but it's not recognizing any HD. He says I need to take it in to my nearest Apple Authorized Service Center. I just took the damn thing out of the box a couple of hours ago, I barely even touched it. I'm sure no one out there can help me, other than to say, yeah, duh, take it in to CompUSA, but I'm just depressed as hell. I was so excited for my new 'puter....<sigh> Has this happened to anyone else? Will they really fix it or will it never work quite right and maybe I should lobby pretty hard for a replacement?
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I have no hard drive.
- Thread starter yarngrrl
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hard drives do fail
Unfortunately hard drive failures are not uncommon. They're rather delicate pieces of machinery which, if not properly handled, can be ruined quite easily, and even if properly handled every drive manufacturer makes a few duds. There's no way to know it's a dud until you try to use it. The same problem exists for CPUs (Tom's Hardware Guide or some other review site recently speculated that something like 1 in 5 CPUs made by Intel or AMD are defective and are counted as a loss or re-sold as a lower-speed version with half the cache memory disabled). Anything at all made by humans has a chance of failure, and electronics are high in failure rates.
Sorry to hear your iMac experience has been poor, but realize that everyone has probably gotten a piece of broken hardware at some point from some company. At least yours is still under warranty so Apple will replace it. I was not so lucky when I had a hard drive fail literally one day after the warranty expired.
Unfortunately hard drive failures are not uncommon. They're rather delicate pieces of machinery which, if not properly handled, can be ruined quite easily, and even if properly handled every drive manufacturer makes a few duds. There's no way to know it's a dud until you try to use it. The same problem exists for CPUs (Tom's Hardware Guide or some other review site recently speculated that something like 1 in 5 CPUs made by Intel or AMD are defective and are counted as a loss or re-sold as a lower-speed version with half the cache memory disabled). Anything at all made by humans has a chance of failure, and electronics are high in failure rates.
Sorry to hear your iMac experience has been poor, but realize that everyone has probably gotten a piece of broken hardware at some point from some company. At least yours is still under warranty so Apple will replace it. I was not so lucky when I had a hard drive fail literally one day after the warranty expired.
yarngrrl said:
Assuming it is just a hard drive failure and not something else (Logic board/SATA controller failure) if they replace the hard drive with a good one, your computer will work fine and you'll never know the difference.
Yeah man, send it back for replacement. You are under applecare and they will be more than happy to fix or replace it. If you bitch enough you may even be able to get a bigger hard drive out of it.
Apple is really good about supporting their products; you'll see.
Apple is really good about supporting their products; you'll see.
Update: I called Apple this morning instead of taking it in (I have to be to work before the store opens and I wanted to get the ball rolling on this whole thing).
After talking to someone in Tech Support who was not very helpful or very pleasant, I got routed to Sales Support where I talked to three different very nice folks. The last of them told me they will send me a new machine and pick up the defective one and that I will be contacted with 48 hours (yes, 48 long hours).
Oh well, this will teach me to get super excited about something and check the website every 4 minutes to see if it's shipped yet. Patience, grasshopper.
So, to make a long story even longer, all in all, my experience with Apple Support was a positive one - so far. I guess it's the longtime PC user in me that is still a little jaded and cynical about the whole tech support thing
After talking to someone in Tech Support who was not very helpful or very pleasant, I got routed to Sales Support where I talked to three different very nice folks. The last of them told me they will send me a new machine and pick up the defective one and that I will be contacted with 48 hours (yes, 48 long hours).
Oh well, this will teach me to get super excited about something and check the website every 4 minutes to see if it's shipped yet. Patience, grasshopper.
So, to make a long story even longer, all in all, my experience with Apple Support was a positive one - so far. I guess it's the longtime PC user in me that is still a little jaded and cynical about the whole tech support thing
yarngrrl said:Update: I called Apple this morning instead of taking it in (I have to be to work before the store opens and I wanted to get the ball rolling on this whole thing).
After talking to someone in Tech Support who was not very helpful or very pleasant, I got routed to Sales Support where I talked to three different very nice folks. The last of them told me they will send me a new machine and pick up the defective one and that I will be contacted with 48 hours (yes, 48 long hours).
Oh well, this will teach me to get super excited about something and check the website every 4 minutes to see if it's shipped yet. Patience, grasshopper.
So, to make a long story even longer, all in all, my experience with Apple Support was a positive one - so far. I guess it's the longtime PC user in me that is still a little jaded and cynical about the whole tech support thing
I'm glad things worked out for you, so far
... Sorry to hear you had to talk to a tool before someone nice... I've been lucky, I've had several issues with Apple, and all the customer reps I've worked with were very nice.If you recall the name of the person who gave you a hard time mention it when you write a Thank You e-mail to Apple... Hmm?
Congrats on the purchase!
One little piece of advice: If ever you need to do hard shut-down, the next reboot should be into Single User Mode because chances are you created errors the drive. Check the sticky threads for more details, but the short version is hold down cmd-s on startup until the black screen appears, then at the prompt type:
fsck -f [including the space, return]
This will run the disk diagnostics and repair any errors. Run it again until no problems are found. Then at the prompt type:
reboot [return]
fsck -f [including the space, return]
This will run the disk diagnostics and repair any errors. Run it again until no problems are found. Then at the prompt type:
reboot [return]
Final Update: I received my replacement iMac yesterday (overnight FedEx) and I have to say how impressed I am with Apple's response to my defective unit. And, yes, it was defective. When I turned the new one on, it was evident that the other one wasn't quite right. (that one took 15-20 minutes to go through the set-up - never even got to OS X, compared to 2-3 minutes on the new one)
I will be sending an email or flowers or something to the nice folks that helped me. It was strange, I felt like they actually wanted to help me - a foreign concept in most support departments. I wish I could remember the name of that jerk I talked to, but it might be in the case notes on their side.
Anyway, I spent most of my evening squealing "Ooo, look at that!" as I discovered new things about this marvelous piece of engineering. I have officially had the Kool-Aid.
I will be sending an email or flowers or something to the nice folks that helped me. It was strange, I felt like they actually wanted to help me - a foreign concept in most support departments. I wish I could remember the name of that jerk I talked to, but it might be in the case notes on their side.
Anyway, I spent most of my evening squealing "Ooo, look at that!" as I discovered new things about this marvelous piece of engineering. I have officially had the Kool-Aid.
Glad to hear it's all worked out for you. Those new iMacs are very tempting and I'm sure you're going to be quite happy with it.