Recently, I accidently unpluged my iMac at the power socket on the wall. Not shutting down a computer in the correct way is not recommended, but, it is not normally an issue.

This time however, I powered up the iMac, after a few seconds of a blank grey screen, the hard drive starts making a ‘clunking’ noise. Three ‘clunks’, then a pause, repeated about 5 times, then I was presented with the “unable to find OS partition” icon on the screen. After a few power downs and restarts, I decided to launch Disk Utility from the OS DVD.

This is where my worst fears were confirmed, the hard drive wasn’t recognised, it didn’t show up at all.

Now, I don’t have a lot of important stuff on my iMac that I couldn’t cope with losing, but the one major thing was 5 years worth of photos. How could I have not backed these up? I know why, it’s becuase i’m lazy. Some of them I could get back from friends, and some I had uploaded to Facebook, but there were numerous others that would be lost forever.

I went to bed that night pretty dejected.

I woke up the next morning, and got ready for work. As I went downstairs to make my toast, I thought “what the hell, I will give the iMac a quick power up to see if the Apple repair fairies had paid a visit”. I couldn’t believe it, the iMac booted!!!

First thing I did was copy my iPhoto library across to a network drive and an external USB drive.

Over the next couple of weeks, I found that the iMac hadn’t fixed itself, the ‘clunk’ noise and no OS icon kept appearing whenever I restarted the iMac, but if I left it off for 20-30 minutes, it worked! I have no idea why.

This was getting rather annoying, so I bought a new hard drive. I have Time Machine running on my iMac, so I was just going to install the new hard drive, and restore the drive from the Time Machine backup.

The hard drive arrived last Friday, and I got home and shutdown the iMac (properly). When shutting down it installed some Apple OS updates that had been downloaded. I thought it would be best if a rebooted the iMac and ran Time Machine one final time to catch the updates that had just been installed. But, as I previously stated, the iMac need a 20-30 mintues before rebooting. I thought I would just try it straight away, I might be lucky.

The iMac booted first time. I restarted again, the iMac booted first time. I have restarted a few times this weekend and not once has the problem reoccured.

It’s a miracle!

P.S. I now regularly backup my iPhotos library, i have Time Machine creating a backup every hour, I periodically copy the iPhoto library to a network drive and attached USB drive, and I also upload everything to my newly purchased flickr account.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.