DIY Computer Fixes

The guts of a computer

Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00560

That title may be misleading because, well I did not fix the problem… yet. Back about a month ago our family computer died. The hard drive failed and there was nothing more I could do for it. Pretty much every photo was already backed up to Google and the cloud so I was okay there. The one thing that I did lose was my Quicken file. That bugs me a lot because I had been maintaining a quicken file for several years and for some reason I got too comfortable with the reliability of the iMac that I didn’t back up the file anywhere. So I lost it. Luckily, however, all of our accounts and whatnot allowed me to pull the transactions into a new Quicken file and I could start again.

When The hard drive crashed I contacted Apple Service to see if they could help. My options were to have someone install a new hard drive for a couple hundred bucks or pay for costly data recovery from the crashed drive and also pay someone to fix the hard drive. I opted for searching on YouTube on how to remove a hard drive from an iMac and replace it yourself. So that is what I did. For just about $100 I got a new hard drive and the tools needed to remove the glass, screen and old hard drive in the iMac. I had andy watch me do it, too because I thought it would be interesting to him. I got him to come see by telling him that he’d see the “guts” of the computer. In his words, he thought there would be more guts.

I got the new hard drive in place and everything buttoned back up but now I cannot load the recovery software. So, it is back to the drawing board.