Greetings, everyone! Guess what, The Hardrive on my iMac crashed and I've lost EVERYTHIN' I'VE DONE IN THE PAST 2 YEARS !!! :/// After a 2 weeks tryin' to find a Mac-compatible HD I've finally found a guy which have broken his iMac (felt from the shelf) and I've purchased it from him. PS.: I'm still under medication to not try to kill myself from the lost :/ (somewhat kiddin')...

God! That is so awefull. Glad you are baring up under the stress.

When I had a Mac I did as Kyoto says, I hooked up externally to a new hardrive, booted, and copy all the data off my crashed drive, I ran my machine off the external drive for months untill I paid some scoundal to pull the internal out and replace it with the external.

I you haven't done anything to the original iMac, what do you get when you boot from the System CD? If it's "Do you want to initialize..." then it may be fixable. "Can't find..." is more problematic but possibly fixable. Nothing at all is worst, recovery fees can run into the thousands. if you don't have Norton Utilities, go to the Symantec website and snag the 30-day trialware. Waht can you loose at this point?

I'm under the impression that the new Macs use standard EIDE (read "PC type") drives. I know the G3s do, I had a Western Digital in mine as a slave for awhile, I assumed the IMacs do to. However, the memory is not the same, in spite of Apple claiming it was "PC100" SDRAM, nope, it's not!

I've sent the HD to the AppleLine, they said the 'hardware' can be saved, but the data is doomed. :( After 2 weeks looking at the computer spreaded over the desk, it's nice it's at least workin' now... just finished installing the 3D/DTP Softwares right now, still upgrading the .net ones . . . :(

That totally sucks :( Paul

Really I'm impressed with your mental/emotional fortitude. Something like that could really just make you never want to touch a keyboard again. Very bad break. Sorry.

So did they return the drive to you? DriveSavers can get data of drives that have been burnt up or drowned. You probably won't want to go through that again; so what you need to know is: CD-R. Superdisks are too small and expensive. CD-R is 640 Megs on a $2 disk, that isn't subject to the ailments that magnetic media all are. On which you are now an expert. Happens to everybody. I hope it was a good two years. =)

Imacken: An CD-R Burner is next on my list, but down here it's offensively costly (about 1.000 us$), costs more than a new iMac.

Ouch. Well like I said, some people go five years before it happens. MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) is around 250,000 hours of operation (last I checked). That's when the manufacturer expects that half of the drives will have failed. How about 20-40 Gigabytes in an external USB case? Power up for backup only, drives don't wear out if they aren't turned on.