OK, this was really funny...
On friday afternoon, the Mac (iMac G5) crashed. I didn't bother much, I turned it off and figured I solve it the next day. Only the next day, it didn't even boot. It showed that lovely blinking question mark thing that I haven't seen since forever and didn't do anything more. Ah well, maybe the crash was hard and the directory needs some repair? No problems, I pop in the Install disk thinking to run Disk Utility. Now it gets scary - Disc Utility can't find the disc. The Hardware test CD did find something though: 2STF/8/3: S-ATA Bus 0 - Master, and advised me to call Apple.
Now, I'm not really a novice at this thing, and I do have some backups, but there are still recent things that would take me some time to replace. I refuse to accept that a 2 month old drive is totally fried. I decide to open up the machine to see if there is anything I can do. I remove and reattach all the cables, and maybe one was a little loose. I put it back together and run the test suite again. This time there are no errors, but the machine still won't boot. Disk Utility will find it though, and I can start the check. The check fails, repair fails when trying to rebuild the B-Trees. It does mount now, however - only within Disk Utility, but still. This means I can get it to show up with Target disk mode and start backing stuff up to the old iMac. That's what I'm doing now.
Now I'd like some advice before going on. The drive is obviously not completely gone, but it looks like it was the cause of the crash. Should I just call Apple and tell them that it's a goner? Will they accept it now that I have managed to get it back up again? Note that I'm still within the 90 days.
If I decide to try to get it back up, which disk repair program would you suggest? I'd really like to try before I buy, to get an idea if it will make the drive work again, before I pay up. I know Diskwarrior has great reviews, but it's expensive for something that I don't know will bring the machine back up.
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