My iMac lives!

I dragged it to the Apple store on Tuesday night in the hopes that they would be able to fix the various things that had gone terribly, terribly wrong. I had been able to get into the machine earlier thanks to some advice on the internets, but the machine was still all kinds of broken. Still, I managed to get into Disk Utilities and determined that whatever had exploded was not caused by a dead or dying hard drive, which was a huge relief. I packed up my machine (hooray for hoarding original boxes), and was off.

My assigned Genius was as good as his title, and quickly determined that my problems were caused by a corrupt government operating system. Unwilling to give the thumbs up to a fresh installation there in the store, I opted to buy a 500GB USB drive so I could manually save my data, having long since disabled Time Machine (a mistake I won’t be making again). The Genius installed a good copy of Lion on the portable drive so I could boot off of it, and sent me on my merry way. Total cost of repair: $80 for the USB drive. Hooray! Love for Apple!

I’ve spent the last two nights setting things up again (wisely moving my machine into the living room so I can squat next to the router – the Lady Cave is wi-fi only which makes for slow downloads [108 hours and 24 minutes remaining on your Lion download lol]), and this morning I successfully transfered the entirety of my iTunes library back onto my iMac for an extremely easy sync of my iPhone. I was worried about losing all my music – I lost 20GB of music in last year’s tragic hard drive crash – but I was *terrified* of losing all my apps. Yes, I could just download them all again from my various Apple accounts, but at last count there were 1348 apps in my mobile directory. Even if only 504 of those are actually installed on my phone, that’s a lot of downloading that I didn’t want to have to do. And I don’t! I love successful data restoration!

Tonight I will install the remaining items I need for day-t0-day life, then move back into the Lady Cave. Once all my information is back on my hard drive, I will use the USB drive for daily Time Machine backups in case my OS explodes anew (which better not happen – I do NOT want to go back to Windows, damnit). The time, stress and $80 I spent on my machine was a small price to pay to have everything back in working order, and I am grateful for all the advice and support I got both online and at the store.

Happy endings: AWESOME.

Now, back to work. I have 10 days to get all the hilarity out of my system before I need to be Very Serious for my next project – no snark allowed, no matter how tempting.