I feel kind of lucky that it was raining and generally crap weather during this long w/e cause I spent most of it looking at progress bars on my imac that died on Saturday morning and was only brought back from the dead a few hours ago.

The last thing I remember doing on my computer was I installed eclipse - I’ve always hated that program but needed to install it to compile an android mobile app I’ve been playing with. Shortly after, my computer became unresponsive and I was forced to shut it down with the power button. Unfortunately, it didn’t come back up.

After a bit of reading on the subject I managed to log into it using single user mode the diagnosis was that my hard drive had errors (invalid node structure), which disk utility was unable to fix. I then tried disk warrior, which couldn’t fix it either. However, I could see my files so I decided to buy a backup drive and a copy of Snow Leopard. Using single user mode I was able to get my files from my dying hard drive on the backup drive. I then reformatted the disk which came back with no errors. So I decided to install Snow Leopard.

Everything was looking good so I proceeded to get my puter back to the way it was, I recovered all my emails and got smtp, imap, mysql and apache servers all up and running again. Feeling pleased with myself getting it back to that point, I thought, I’d better back it up using time machine just in case, something went wrong again.

It would have been 10 minutes after my backup finished that the same thing happened again, my imac froze and I was forced to shut it down at the switch. However, It didn’t come back this time, and worse I couldn’t enter using single user mode or boot from the cd - I was stuffed. Desperate, I started scouring the web for more info, I rang around for quotes to fix it, thinking that maybe my logic board or ram may have gone this time. I let it go, and then this morning I came up with an idea that I read about. It involved booting my imac using another computer in firewire mode. This actually worked and from the diagnostic report I could tell that my hard drive was hosed and that the rest of my system seemed to be ok.

I had another 1TB hard drive in my mythtv box that I had only just started using and then thought about installing that drive in my imac and fixing it myself. Being a bit scared of tampering with the internals of my imac, I looked around the interweb and saw a youtube clip of some nerd pulling apart his imac. It was then I bit the bullet and thought to myself that I can do that. I hopped in the car and bought myself a Torq 8 screwdriver and some suction cups - to pull the glass off - and proceeded to follow the youtube instructions and replace the hard drive myself - and guess what? It fricken worked.

The best part was after reformatting and installing Snow Leopard on the new drive I had an option during the install that asked if I wished to restore my settings from a backup. I connected up the backup drive and selected yes. About half an hour later my computer was back the way it was the night before, now with a bigger hard drive.