Reliability of the Genius store hardware tests etc.

Any views? Took my 3 month old iMac by appointment into an Apple Store today several phone agents and long calls failed to get my 3 month old iMac restarted. Refused to reinstall OS to what we thought was a clean disk “Running Bless to place boot files failed”. Also Disk utility showed the disk was anything but empty. A large grey bar (636gb ‘other’ and the internal disk allegedly in 4 partitions - 3 not mounted) Agent did a hardware test, much more detailed than the built in one (which btw said everything was fine). No hardware problems. Agent said it was clearly a software problem and would reinstall. Call me later to collect. An hour later another guy rang to say there WAS a problem. The drive was scrap! They are doing it under warranty. The initial problem btw started a week ago with the screen flashing from background to black and back again randomly. The guy who phoned me about the disk told

me the two things were certainly related. I am slightly wary after so many different stories from the phone agents and now the store techies. Left me wondering how reliable was the Apple hardware test and is it likely the flashing is related to the disk failure? Thanks in advance for your comments. 2019 Apple iMac 21.5 with 1tb Fusion Drive,


Posted on Sep 2, 2019 2:30 PM

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Sep 2, 2019 7:27 PM in response to Bennieg

While Apple's service diagnostics are better than the one available to regular users, even the service diagnostic will only catch some problems. Even Apple's service diagnostics have limitations. As another user mentioned, the only time any diagnostic is useful is if it finds a problem. If a diagnostic reports an issue, then most times it is valid. If a diagnostic passes, it just means it cannot locate a problem, not that everything is Ok.


A lot of repairs come down to a technician's personal experience and knowledge, gut instinct, trial and error, and sometimes a little luck. I can tell you from personal experience that some hardware issues can be very difficult to diagnose correctly. I'll frequently ask another tech for assistance and insight as we all come to it with different skills and insight.


Personally whenever I work on a computer I will also use third party apps and utilities to try to find a clue. I have no idea whether Apple Genius Bar tech does such a thing or not (probably not).

Sep 2, 2019 2:58 PM in response to babowa

Thanks for reply. I appreciate what you say but the Apple store diagnostic test also confirmed there were no problems even though successive software techs had isolated the issue down to a hardware problem - and they had been trying for several days to help me. The Store guy was adamant that the Apple tests were ‘absolutely reliable’

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Reliability of the Genius store hardware tests etc.

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