Hard Drive Failure

After running a PC for many years, I switched to an iMac last November. My machine is a 20" iMac with 500GB HD and 3GB of ram. Last night it wouldn't boot up and I finally booted from disk and tried to do a restore via Time Machine. After 12 hours and no blinking of the data transfer lights on my external HD, I called AppleCare. An hour on the phone with AppleCare and I was told the hard drive had failed and I needed to take the machine to the local Mac House. I should get it back Monday. This older PC is driving me crazy. I love my Mac!

I sure hope Time Machine works!!! I lost a few hours of sleep over this last night. I'd never go back to a PC but if Time Machine restores my machine, I'll be Apples best salesman!!!

Please tell me Time Machine works!

I have used it twice to restore my machine, so it worked well for me! Hope all goes well for you too!

This is good news, thanks for the reply!

Doug if you booted from the install disc, did you run Repair Disk and see what Disk Utility had to say about the drive?

No we didn't run Repair Disk. We were uable to restore and the HD was showing as 'read only', even after erasing it. When trying to partition the drive as '1 Partition' we got an error that the drive was busy so partition failed. The drive showed as 'read only' which I assume is why the restore wouldn't take place. AppleCare made the determination that the HD had failed after walking me through about an hour of checks and procedures.