Moms imac Broke

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My moms imac has degraded to the point that it will no longer boot. This happened a few months ago and a friend ran a disk utility on it and it was okay for a while but now it's at a point that it won't boot to single user, cd or anything. When I bought it for her I got complete care so that's good and it had a usb drive on it with timemachine enabled so her data SHOULD be okay. But truth be told I've never used timemachine to restore anything and I'm a little nervous about turning her computer over to a complete stranger and crossing my fingers in the hope that they'll bring their "A" game to the data transfer process. If this weren't an imac it'd be trivial to remove the hard drive and backup the data but I'm not comfortable tearing that thing open.

So, do I have any options for a final shot at a backup other than handing this over to the folks at the apple store?
Is there a way I can check to confirm her data is on the timemachine usb drive?
Should I give the apple folks the imac and the usb drive and let them restore or should I hang onto the drive and do it myself?
 

pigoo3

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iMacs have been around since 1998...and thus come in many different shapes & sizes. It would probably be helpful if you told us what model you have, and then we could offer some disassembly suggestions to get the hard drive out of it (if that's route you would prefer to go).

- Nick
 
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Sorry, you're right.

24" imac, bought about a year ago. I'd prefer not to pop it open as the instructions I looked up a few months ago involved glaziers tools and pulling that sheet of glass off the front.
 

pigoo3

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Sorry, you're right.

24" imac, bought about a year ago. I'd prefer not to pop it open as the instructions I looked up a few months ago involved glaziers tools and pulling that sheet of glass off the front.

Thanks for the model info that helps. There are actually some pretty good videos out on You Tube on how to remove the hard drive from one of these iMacs. Maybe you could give one of them a look, and see what you think.

Of course if you're not comfortable with the procedure I can understand that. It just sounded like from your initial post, that if you could get your hands on the hard drive that you would be fine from there.

By the way...if you bought this computer "about a year ago" is it still covered under warranty?

- Nick

p.s. FYI...to remove the glass you just need a couple suction cups.;)
 
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Oh wait. So I plugged in the backup drive on a mac mini and it appears time machine keeps home dirs as just plain old files. I was under the impression it was kept as some user-inaccessible database but it really just looks like a date separated copy of files. Is that right? So I could just make a copy of the backup drive and at the very least I'd have a copy of her profile?

I plugged the timemachine drive into a mac mini, created an account with the same name as her account on the busted imac and restored just her data. It all appears to be there. I think I'm confident I can turn this over to the apple store folks for them to work their magic. It's not that I don't trust them, but you know, it's my mom.

thanks for your advice pigoo3, you're right, it's not too daunting to open one up (if the imac wasn't in warranty I'd tear it open in a heartbeat but I'd hate to void the complete care I paid for)
 

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