Computer tech sought

[MTPorcupine3]

I'm writing this from someone else's computer, because mine completely crashed. It's a 17" 2004 iMac. It froze up whilst I was doing ordinary work, and it will not reboot at this time. Before I take it to an Apple store or 'authorised' dealer, is there any porcupine among you qualified and willing to offer repair services at a reasonable cost? Please PM your response.

[KBCraig]

2007 + 17" = white polycarbonate, right?

The obvious answer is that your hard drive is toast. If you can live without the data, try reformatting and reinstalling the OS. If you need the computer now and can wait on trying to recover the data, try booting from the Mac DVD and installing it on an external FW800 drive.

Getting to the internal drive is "not trivial", as they say. Here are some instructions:

http://home.comcast.net/~woojo/DFFA53A0-F23D-4541-9015-481FD3B6532E/iMac_Disassembly.html

Once you've got it out, you can replace it with the SATA drive of your choice, then try putting the original drive in an external enclosure and see if you can get it to spin up and mount.

If it seems dead, try the freezer trick: put it in a zip-lock bag in your freezer for three days, then allow it to come up to room temperature for three days. Then, try it again. If it's still dead, you can try a professional data recovery service, but they're expen$$$ive.

No matter what, at the end you might as well use it for target practice, because you can't trust it again.

[Bill St. Clair]

My 2006 iMac drive died a while back. I've been running on an external firewire drive since then. Works good. I had to eventually open the machine and disconnect the drive because it was being flaky instead of just dead and causing long hangs. Had I known I was going to have to do that, I would have bought a new internal drive, but I already had the external, and another four hours of restore was not my idea of a good time (though it would have been faster from the firewire drive than from my USB backup drive).

[error]

I'm writing this from someone else's computer, because mine completely crashed. It's a 17" 2004 iMac. It froze up whilst I was doing ordinary work, and it will not reboot at this time. Before I take it to an Apple store or 'authorised' dealer, is there any porcupine among you qualified and willing to offer repair services at a reasonable cost? Please PM your response.

I can take a look, but Mac hardware is decidedly unusual. I can almost certainly get your data out of it, but I'd have to reserve judgment on whether it can be fixed.

[leetninja]

I am a Sr Sys Admin 24x7 for my company and happen to specialize in the mac portion of our company.  If you would like I can take a look at it.  It might be something simple.  I would have to start with the basics obviously and diagnose from there but if you are still having problems let me know.  I will be around.