iMac Hard drive failure

[benguild]

My dad has a brand new iMac at his office... it's their only computer and they *just* got it.
The hard drive has failed with everything on it.

He's going to the Apple store tomorrow but is there anything we should try? I booted it from my Macbook's Install CD... Disk Utility sees the drive but no partitions... and 0 disk space.

 

[Reflow]

My dad has a brand new iMac at his office... it's their only computer and they *just* got it.
The hard drive has failed with everything on it.

He's going to the Apple store tomorrow but is there anything we should try? I booted it from my Macbook's Install CD... Disk Utility sees the drive but no partitions... and 0 disk space.

So your dad is the only one there that has a computer You can't use the MB install CD you need to use the iMac's cd to use disk utility

 

[benguild]

Disk Utility ran... though... what's the difference?

 

[benguild]

Help?

 

[CanadaRAM]

Actually, you often can run Disk Utility from a "wrong" CD if the machine will boot as far as the initial menus. Its the subsequent installer stage that will fail because of the wrong machine.

Smash: were you able to run Repair Disk in Disk Utility at all?

If so: what did it report

If not: Your chances of recovery are slender. Anything like pulling the disk out to try it in another machine would be inadvisable beacuse of warranty.

Without another Mac around, or an external hard drive to boot from and recover data to, you options are slim.

If you had the resources, you could set up an external drive with the OSX on it, plus Data Rescue II and one of the other disk utilities like TechTool Pro, Disk Warrior or Drive Genius. Then try to recover the data to the external drive. But... if it is a serious hardware problem on the internal drive, you're out of luck.