iMac Predicament - Renting a Mac to help?

Hello All,

I have a predicament, and a plan, but the good people on these forums are always good to consult IMO.

Here's my story:

I have a 17" iMac with a logic board issue. It won't start up now. I think the only option at this point is to reinstall mac osx.

Also, I have a backup hard drive that has most of my data from before the iMac began to not boot.

I took both the iMac and the hard drive to the apple store to see if they could use one of their computers to look at th iMacs drive, and simply transfer my most recent docs to my backup hard drive. Now, here is the problem:

The mac genius informed me that not only is my iMacs HD non-repairable, the same goes for my backup hard drive!!! There was nothing he could do outside of giving me some business cards of local data recovery services.

Other than that, he did say that it very well could be a directory issue, something that Diskwarrior could possibly fix. So, I bought diskwarrior, went home and ran it on my iMacs HD. It seemed to work fine, but I still cannot boot from my iMac.

Here's my plan

I am wary to go ahead and just run disk warrior oN my backup drive just yet. Since diskwarrior can see all of the files on my iMac, I'm thinking that I just need another mac, boot my iMac into FireWire target disk mode, and use this other mac to backup all of that data onto DVDs. I don't think that this is a practical task for the genius bar, and I don't want to buy another mac now (waiting till the spring).

Is it possible to rent a mac for just a day or two?

Is my plan at this point feasible?

Is there another plan of action I should consider instead?

Thanks in advance, and thanks fir reading his very long post. As always, any assistance is much appreciated.

Regards,

DCBass

 

Thanks for the suggestions...

Hey All,

Thanks for the responses Macky and Bob.

After talking with a local mac shop and explaining my problem, I was told that, now that Diskwarrior was run and appeared to go well, launch back into Disk Utility. Try to run 'verify disk', and if all goes well, then simply do an archive and install of Mac OS X. If it does not go well, then it's an indicator that there's a hard drive issue, and that it needs to be taken out and replaced.

This advice was free and over the phone, for which I was much appreciative. I just gave it a shot today, and everything worked out great.

Verify Disk told me everything was fine and good, so I went ahead and did an Archive and Install, and now everything is back to normal.

Thanks again for the help, and hopefully this post may provide someone else with help someday.

Cheers,

DCBass