I just got an email from Apple stating my iMac qualifies for the iMac 1TB Seagate HD Relacement Program. Oh boy, aren't I lucky 😟 I have Time Machine and a CCC bootable clone backup. Is it as simple as cloning back my System onto the new hard drive. The Apple email says I need to start from scratch with the Install DVD that came with the computer. What's the best proceedure.
iMac (21.5-inch Late 2009), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2), IOS6, Apple TV2, Airport
Mine failed just 3 months ago, but it's unclear if my replacement is affected in the recall. I've now called Apple Support twice and have gotten two different answers. On the first call, the technician said if the your serial number comes up eligilble and it's a SeaGate drive, you should take it in and replace it. The second technician said if it's been replaced, it should be fine. Anyone know if the replacement drives are faulty?
. . . and, FYI, when I had mine replaced, they asked which operating system I was using when it failed and they restored it at the store on the new drive. Time machine restored my computer as expected. It was quite smooth. No complaints about the replacement - though it was a pain hauling a 27" iMac back into the store without the box! ! !
baltwo wrote:
Anyhow, Joe and I are on the same track and he'll let us know how it goes.
New HD was put in today. It went almost perfect with the exception of getting the display video connections seated properly. On the first Start, the display was showing some pixelation or noise. The Tech took it apart again and reseated all the connections and that seemed to do the trick. She called Apple to document the issue incase I have problems in the future.
Started the iMac while holding the Option Key, chose the Clone and booted up. Reformatted the new drive and copied the Clone back to the Macintosh HD, including the Recovery HD. Booted into the new HD with no issues. So the whole process worked great.
Thanks as usual for eveyones help 😎
Absolutely fabulous!
Love it when a plan comes together and works.
Since the new HD was installed, I'm trying to figure out if this is my imagination or real. It seems my iMac is considerably faster, especially using the Finder.
I guess when I think of a hard drive failure, the first thought is one day it's working the next it's not. But what I'm wondering is if the HD was on a slow path to failure and the effects were gradual enough to not know the HD was failing.
Another thing I noticed was Time machine. I decided to reformat my TM external HD and start with a new full backup. I did this before about 6 weeks ago and it took TM 6-7 hours to back up about 470 GB of data. This time with a reformatted TM drive and the new internal HD the backup took about 2 hours. Again, was the 6-7 hour backup a result of a slowly failing HD.
Which brand HD and version was your replacement?
Joe Gramm wrote:
But what I'm wondering is if the HD was on a slow path to failure and the effects were gradual enough to not know the HD was failing.
IMO, highly unlikely. More a result of not maintaining the computer properly. These should keep it working smoothly:
Mac Maintenance Quick Assist,
Mac OS X speed FAQ,
Speeding up Macs,
How to Speed up Macs,,
Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance,
Essential Mac Maintenance: Get set up,
Essential Mac Maintenance: Rev up your routines,
Maintaining OS X,
Five Mac maintenance myths and
Myths of required versus not required maintenance for Mac OS X.
I wasn't expecting that answer, but it makes perfect sense. I already do some of the maintenance from those links you supplied.
I keep a lot of files on the internal drive. I know I should keep these files on a seperate drive, but I have tons of video files, photos and music on the internal drive. So now maybe I'm just seeing the effects of reformating and cloning the new drive. Don't want to use the word, but like a defag effect???
Also, keeping files on seperate drives means a more complicated backup scheme. One reason why I don't do it: but I should.
Lastly, I think I've always done upgrade installs on practically every OS X. So maybe a deep cache cleaning would help. I haven't performed that type maintenance in quite a while.
Thanks baltwo
Since I routinely clone my three OS boot volumes (I have six on each of three HDs) and reverse the process, that defrags those. Also, I don't do any music, movie, or photo stuff with my machines, so can't address that, but suggest keeping them on separate volumes (partitions) and also cloning them to ext FWHDs. Finally, my current OSs all came from the original OS 9 installation on the G4, through Jaguar to ML. I've never done any clean installs except as a one time test, but then migrated from the previous version. IMO, this is totally a waste of time.
baltwo wrote:
my current OSs all came from the original OS 9 installation on the G4, through Jaguar to ML. I've never done any clean installs except as a one time test, but then migrated from the previous version.
Same here
My replacement
Model: ST31000528AS
Revision: AP2E
Got my machine back today, and after a nightmare with time machine it looks to be back were I started ( a slight issue with aperture not showing movies )
The new drive is:
Model: APPLE HDD HUA722010CLA330
Revision: JP05I54D
Which after a web search I believe is a
Hitachi-HGST Ultrastar A7K2000 24x7 enterprise drive
I hope it's o.k. if I chime in here as I am also affected by the replacement programm. I just would like to make sure I didn't get things wrong before I proceed with erasing my Seagate 1TB HD.
I have been using CCC to have a bootable clone of my complete Macintosh HD at hand whenever needed. That said, I supposed that I could boot from that clone, erase and reformat the new HD and restore the clone using CCC.
baltwo wrote:
After the tech pops in the new HD, restart, holding down the OPTION key, select the clone, boot with it, run DU to erase and format the new HD, and then restore the clone.
From what I have learned reading through the posts here, this option would be "fast and smart" as baltwo liked to say. Alternatively, I could restore the whole system (users, settings and apps) from that same CCC clone also by employing the Setup Assistant on first boot of the new HD. That may however take some more time. Please correct me if I am wrong.
With the installation of Lion on my iMac (originally setup with Snow Leopard) a "Recovery HD" was introduced on my system. The Apple Support technician recommended me to boot from this recovery partition to erase the old HD before it gets replaced (of course I do not intend to hand over all my personal data...).
Now my question: Under which circumstances will the "Recovery HD" also be established on the new HD? As far as I understand this a partition independent from the "regular" boot partition (i.e. the one with my Lion OS X). Will it be included in the clone restored via CCC (I would not expect)? Will it be established when I use the Setup Assistant and restore from the clone?
Maybe it is not too important to have that "Revovery HD" partition at all but I would feel much more comfortable if I knew how things are supposed to evolve when proceeding with the replacement.
Thanks a lot for your feedback!
d-light
d-light wrote:
I have been using CCC to have a bootable clone of my complete Macintosh HD at hand whenever needed. That said, I supposed that I could boot from that clone, erase and reformat the new HD and restore the clone using CCC.
baltwo wrote:
After the tech pops in the new HD, restart, holding down the OPTION key, select the clone, boot with it, run DU to erase and format the new HD, and then restore the clone.
From what I have learned reading through the posts here, this option would be "fast and smart" as baltwo liked to say. Alternatively, I could restore the whole system (users, settings and apps) from that same CCC clone also by employing the Setup Assistant on first boot of the new HD. That may however take some more time. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The issue with this approach is that you won't know which OS, if any, is on the new HD. If not the same as on the clone, then you'll waste time updating it to match. What take time is installing the OS. Once that's finished, then using the Setup Assistant to migrate takes additional time, as does updating. In my testing, restoring the clone is the fastest way to get back to where you were previously. That minimizes having to reinstall anything.
Now my question: Under which circumstances will the "Recovery HD" also be established on the new HD? As far as I understand this a partition independent from the "regular" boot partition (i.e. the one with my Lion OS X). Will it be included in the clone restored via CCC (I would not expect)? Will it be established when I use the Setup Assistant and restore from the clone?
If you used CCC to make the clone and took advantage of installing the Recovery HD to that volume, then when you restore, you'll have the opportunity to restore the Recovery HD. Details at http://help.bombich.com/kb/troubleshooting/will-ccc-clone-the-recovery-hd-partit ion-on-lion
baltwo wrote:
If you used CCC to make the clone and took advantage of installing the Recovery HD to that volume, then when you restore, you'll have the opportunity to restore the Recovery HD. Details at http://help.bombich.com/kb/troubleshooting/will-ccc-clone-the-recovery-hd-partit ion-on-lion
Thanks a lot for your spontaneous reply! I just read through Bombich's documentation you kindly linked to. I wasn't aware of that feature. Moreover, I just checked my last clone and looked into the related Library/Application Support/com.Bombich.ccc folder which indeed contains a "Recovery HD.dmg" image. 🙂
In a kind of spleen I may have misunderstandingly derived from my earlier Linux days (and nights) I use to launch CCC from another (older) bootable external harddrive when I clone my IMac's internal HD. I kind of thought that this would be a prerequisite to be able to clone a partition without any access limitations (e.g. by the running OS). But this is not necessary, is it? I mean I could simply use CCC on my running machine to clone the complete HD, right? I just wasn't sure if the CCC version installed on the external HD (with my last Snow Leopard version running) has that RecoveryHD integration feature already on board (must be obviously already V. 3.4.4)
In any case, the Carbon Copy Cloner is a great piece of software and I am very happy to have bought a licence quiet early after I tried it. Restoring the clone using CCC will be the aproach of my choice!
d-light wrote:
…Carbon Copy Cloner is a great piece of software and I am very happy to have bought a licence quiet early after I tried it. Restoring the clone using CCC will be the aproach of my choice!
iMac 1TB Replacement Program
