When we last spoke, I asked you WHAT CAUSED MY IMAC TO FAIL?
For the sake of compiling the responses (as some came in on Facebook, some as comments here, and , they included:
Brett Slatkin:
Guesses: 1. Unseated memory (though they would have replaced that?) 2. Bad power supply 12V rail
Richard "PkerUNO" Whittaker:
I'm not replying until you specify how many Picarats this is worth.
And the fact that you didn't mention matchsteeks is highly suspicious!
"R":
Hmm... I'm going to go with... SATA cable?
Adam "rampage" Meltzer:
So, multiple hard drives, multiple different media from multiple different sources. So, it's not the CD drive, and not the hard drive.
We already have 12V rail and SATA cable as possibilities. What about the power cable for the HDD?
Sometimes it's the simple things. I remember when I worked at Sun in the mid 1990s, the SPARC Stations of that vintage wouldn't boot if there was no keyboard connected. Made for a troubleshooting nightmare when trying to figure out why the damn machine wouldn't power on.
Ryan "Lee" Short:
I think Major Nelson snuck into your iMac through the combined power of Live Anywhere and magic...that, or something entirely too simple like a loose jumper or something...
Without further ado, the answer:
The complete and utter failure of my machine to stay running, to verify the integrity of my hard disk, and to reinstall the operating system off of multiple media was caused by a faulty 2GB RAM module. Yes, apparently in that overnight period (when the initial blue screen happened), the DIMM went rogue and failed to actually hold data in some portions. But because this was one of two RAM chips, and it was presumably a sector that wouldn't have been accessed until some quantity of the RAM was filled, it only showed up sporadically.
The repair company figured this out when they pulled one DIMM and had the reinstall fail, but pulling the other one lead to a successful reinstall.
So no one quite got it right, but Brett wins an honorary 5 Picarats for at least guessing it was RAM related.
Obviously it wasn't necessary to wipe my hard drive, but given the logical troubleshooting that I had to follow at the time, it was a necessity.
The major loss here was not significant documents (all in my Dropbox account), or my address book or bookmarks (MobileMe), or my email (I actually don't use a desktop email client). My iPhone application data was easily backed up before re-associating it with the "new" computer.
The main thing I lost with my iTunes library, which had very recently crossed the five-digit threshold for music, and had nearly all of my prized TV show DVDs ripped to an iTunes-happy format. Also lost: ratings data for 60% of the music, done on a far more granular level (numeric 1-100) than most people manage (iTunes only exposes 1-5 as values by default).
Luckily, I wasn't completely screwed here, either. The "Transfer Purchases" option applied to my iPhone managed to nab nearly everything I had bought (and rated high enough) off the iTunes since its launch in 2003. My tendency to transfer about an album a month to my office machine for the few moments I'm at my desk allowed a more complete restore of some albums.
I will say this, though: when my machine died, iTunes 8 was still current. When the machine returned, iTunes 9 was out. I've heard people complain about the interface changes in that upgrade, but let me state emphatically that they're ten times worse when you have to rebuild your library from scratch and learn a slightly changed interface at the same time.
The one other major loss in this crash was my activation for Rosetta Stone, and since I seem to have misplaced the serial number, a phone call to their support line is in order. (Needless to say, Project Moon Language has been on hold.)