The cost of repairing a Mac is less than expected

When my iMac 11,1's 2yo 1TB Seagate drive developed metastatic blockitis I was most unhappy.

It wasn't that the drive is dying young, just two weeks after my AMEX extended warranty lapsed. Two years is short for a drive, but this machine runs all the time and goes through two full disk backups every single night. The drive has had a hard life.

The fact Apple's diagnostics missed my drive's unmasked bad blocks is annoying. There's no magic to a disk scan; I shouldn't have had to buy TechTools Pro to make a diagnosis. Windows diagnostics have managed this for twenty years.

Worse though, is the cost of the repair. FirstTech, a well regarded local shop, gave me a $625 quote to install a 2TB replacement. (They can't get 1TB drives.). I was amazed, I'm used to paying $150 or so for a drive and doing my own installation. That's what I did when my old fully serviceable G5 drive died.

The problem is that the lovely 27" iMac is not user serviceable. Elegant quite design with special thermal sensor cables turns out to have a high post-purchase price. That's why I wrote ...

Gordon's Tech: Mac drive diagnostics: TechTools Pro and Drive Genius find problems OS X missed

... When you consider that iMac 27" hard drives are NOT user serviceable, the iMac is more expensive than it seems. The iMac G5 was entirely user serviceable. Design has its price....

I was wrong though. Today i checked what the cost would be for an Apple store repair. They quoted me about $200 for a 1TB drive replacement. (They don't do upgrades, only like-for-like replacements.)

How do they do that? Apple has a flat $40 service fee, regardless of the complexity of the repair. Apple offsets the ownership cost of their elegant designs by subsidizing repair. (In this case they have another advantage -- they have an inventory of 1TB drives with bundled thermal cables even as the world runs short of hard drives.)

I still prefer my G5 iMac's design -- but that was a hot and noisy machine. My 11,1 (i5, 27" 2009) iMac is quiet and cool most of the time. Apple's subsidy of post-warrany repairs makes that tradeoff more palatable - at least if you live near an Apple store!

Update 1/6/12: One warning: they will want to keep the hard drive. This fits with their out-of-warrantee repair following their in warrantee process. Apple should make this better known. It means if you bring your machine in for an Apple Store repair, you need to do a secure wipe first. Some additional tips:

• Create an admin account with no password that Apple can use for testing. I didn't think of this, and my machine has guest account disabled.
• They will want to recreate the problem -- even though I have to pay for the repair. Again, their out-of-warranty repair is basically in-warranty with a parts-charge and subsidized labor.

Update 9/2/2012: In comments Alex points to a 1TB Seagate drive replacement program! Alas, my serial number wasn't accepted. I bet this is what hit me though. I wonder if Apple will eventually extend the program. I'm W8946HAH5PJ.

Update 8/3/2013: Sometime in the past year Apple sent me a check for the costs of this drive. They did eventually extend the replacement program.

Mac drive diagnostics: TechTools Pro and Drive Genius find problems OS X missed

I've been having suspicious application crashes lately. In the Mac world, that suggests a hardware problem. (Once upon a time software was the cause, but these days it's hardware.)

I knew from some backup issues that I had 3 unreadable files. That suggests my 24+ month old 1TB iMac drive is dying youngish. It was time for some diagnostics, so I plugged in my old Apple Keyboard and mouse. (Most non-trivial diagnostic work requires a wired keyboard and mouse; Apple's bluetooth keyboard/mouse drivers may be unavailable when needed.)

After I deleted the bad (non-critical happily) files I ran Disk Utility - but the drive passed. Then I ran my Apple Hardware Test - extended, and loop mode. Still no problems.

I didn't believe it. Something had to be wrong. So I checked out Disk Warrior, Disk Genius and TechTool Pro - 3 reputable diagnostic apps. They're all $100. Disk Warrior has a good reputation, but Disk Genius has a trial version. It found about 58 bad blocks -- out of 1.8 billion. That seems a modest number, but DG said I needed to replace the drive. (Incidentally, Disk Genius has a built in uninstall feature -- very nice. Yes, the Mac needs an OS level uninstaller.)

I decided to get a second opinion. Andy M clued me to a MacUpdate bundle, so I got TechTool Pro 6 for $50 (plust a bunch of other apps I don't care about). It one-upped Disk Genius; as it found bad blocks it told me which of them had files (none in this case).

TTP also found bad blocks - 56 (so two less than Disk Genius, but I don't make much of that either way).

I wasn't sure what to make of this. After all, 56 out of 1.8 billion is minuscule. Unfortunately, a modern SATA drive shouldn't have any bad blocks. The excellent TTP manual explains why ...

... TechTool Pro should not normally report bad blocks for these types of drives. The drive controller in them automatically tries to map out bad blocks as they are encountered. It will do this unless either the bad block is in a critical area that cannot be mapped out at the moment or the bad block table is full. If this occurs, TechTool Pro will report a bad block and you will ultimately need to do a low level reinitialization of the drive. When the drive is reinitialized, the entire platter is accessible so that bad blocks can be mapped out if possible no matter where they occur...

.. You can use Apple's Disk Utility to reinitialize your drive. Be sure to choose the Security Option to "zero out data." Choosing this option will map out bad blocks, if possible, during the reinitialization. This may take several hours (depending on the size of your drive). If the reinitialization is successful, the drive should be fine at that point. We suggest, however, that you do a Surface Scan a few times in the next month or two just to be sure no new bad blocks are developing. If they are, then the drive is probably failing and you should consider replacing it. If a low level reinitialization fails, this indicates the drive is faulty and needs to be replaced...

So the bad blocks I see now are probably a small fraction of the number that have already been mapped out. I'm seeing the overflow, including blocks that went bad after they'd been written to.

My i5 iMac is 24 months and 2 weeks old - so it's past even my AMEX extended warranty (by two weeks!). If the drive were user serviceable (like my old G5 iMac!) I'd simply replace it. Since it's not a user serviceable I'll probably bring a new drive and the machine to FirstTech in Minneapolis for a $200 24 hour turnaround replacement. I'll make a bootable clone before I do that. (My usual Carbon Copy Cloner backups are to an encrypted image for offsite transfer, so not bootable.)

If it doesn't I'll try the reinitialization. (See Update - this drive is on death row.)

Update 12/21/2011: Various notes and reflections the day after ...

• 16 months is a short lifespan for a hard drive. I bought this machine early in its lifecycle, I wonder if there will be more failures in this product line.
• Modern drives don't write to bad blocks. Based on the dates of the files that were involved the involved blocks went bad in the past month. That fits with Carbon Copy Cloner not complaining until recently. (See my backup issue post for a twist to this story.)
• I'm glad I bought TechTools Pro - I think I'll get good use of it. From what I know now though, I didn't really need it. In a modern drive a single bad block in a file, especially a relatively recently written file, means replacement. Carbon Copy Cloner told me 3 files were bad.
• The TTP manual suggests reformatting. I suspect that might work if there was an initial formatting problem, but in this case I know existing blocks are going bad. This drive is on death row.
• Carbon Copy Cloner complained about bad sectors in files during backup, but Time Machine didn't. That may be because Time Machine only reads files that have changed?
• Most of the bad sectors are in unused parts of the drive. I suspect they were randomly distributed but were hidden by the drive OS as they were discovered in the parts of the drive that have been used (about 500GB of 1TB).
• Drive Utility and Hardware Test didn't find any problems, but both Drive Genius 3 and Tech Tools Pro failed the drive and Carbon Copy Cloner complained too. The SMART diagnostics still pass the drive - even today! I'm a bit surprised; this isn't rocket science. Apple could do better. TechTools Pro gives more SMART diagnostics than Disk Utility -- my drive was complaining about heat (it's cold in this room!)
• It's clearly worth running TechTools Pro or equivalent drive scan on a new drive then every few months. (11/23/11: TTP just crashed during a routine drive scan. I'm not impressed.)
• I think Windows scandisk/chkdsk are superior diagnostic tools to Disk Utility.
• TechTools Pro DVD includes an image for burning a PPC DVD. Nice touch. I still have an old PPC.
• It's good to know the drive is dying before it dies. I have time to do extra backups and to move selected files to other machines -- including my Aperture and iPhoto Libraries and perhaps iTunes.
• When you consider that iMac 27" hard drives are NOT user serviceable, the iMac is more expensive than it seems. The iMac G5 was entirely user serviceable. Design has its price.
• Since I know the drive is dying I've disconnected my clone backup. It's my known good repository. I'll take it to my office then create a new clone, then disconnect that clone. I won't be saving data to this machine, I'll be treating it as a "guest" machine until I get it serviced. I may turn off Time Machine too.
• OWC (Other World Computing - great Mac shop) showed me how to find my Model Identifier (System Profiler), it's iMac11,1. I can only go to 2TB of storage. I'm not confident that their options are correct however.

See also:

• How do you upgrade the hard drive in the "Late 2009," "Mid-2010," "Mid-2011" and "Late 2011" (21.5-Inch and 27-Inch) Aluminum iMac models? - I'm glad I didn't consider doing this myself. I wonder if this is almost an Apple-only replacement.
• Proprietary Cable can put the brakes on upgrading Late '09 iMacs. | Other World Computing Blog: I have an ST31000528ASQ - so Seagate. OWC says these drives will fit my computer's thermal cable: 
  • 1.0TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12
  • 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
  • 2.0TB Seagate Barracuda LP

Backups - why you need two methods and abundant paranoia

I can't say I feel good about my backups. I believe data wants to die; it wants to be free of the burden of order. Against the despair of data, even the best backup is barely adequate.

Consider tonight, when everything almost failed - Time Capsule and Carbon Copy Cloner alike.

The Time Capsule serves all the machines in our home over a wireless network. I was surprised at first that backup would work over wireless, but it does. Each machine has its own unencrypted disk image; one on the TC's old internal 500 GB drive, two others have images on an external 2TB drive. The TC sits in a closet upstairs;  it's unlikely to be stolen but fire would destroy it. I have done 1-2 file Time Machine restores from that image, so I know it can work. The only test of a backup, of course, is a restore.

I don't trust Time Machine as much as old-time DantzRetrospect, but it seems Apple has gotten most of the bugs out.

I trust Carbon Copy Cloner [3] more. Each day it clones my server, on which all the important data lives. It's more than a cloner; CCC keeps copies of changed or deleted files in "_CCC Archives". I've configured CCC to use an encrypted image it automatically mounts every night. Since that backup is encrypted I can take it offsite, which I do every few weeks. Ok, every month or two. Offsite rotation relies on me, so it's prone to failure. Still, even if the house burns, I am unlikely to lose more than a month of images and videos. I can live with that.

So I have two backup methods, both fully automated, both relatively independent [2]. If each is 95% reliable each day, then the chance both fail on a given day is 1/400. If the daily chance of a server drive failure is 1/1000, the odds of all three failing on the same day are about 1/400,000 [2], [4]

Tonight though, my data got within a few miles of the cliff it wants to meet.

My server has been having worrisome memory exception (EXC_BAD_ACCESS) crashes, and a TV show I  recently downloaded had a file error [1]. There's something wrong on my 2yo i5 iMac; I need to run Apple Hardware Test (again). So I know my server data is at risk.

Time Capsule has had problems too -- it's reporting a "communications error" periodically. I think that error message is  a scarlet herring related to the iMac issues, but clearly I can't trust that backup.

Happily there's good old CCC -- but when I restarted my server for the first time in weeks it reported a problem. The backup drive didn't mount. That was easy to diagnose -- I'd unplugged it. Probably when I was debugging my Aperture crash 3 weeks ago. Why didn't CCC report the error? Maybe it had crashed.

I wasn't that close to data loss -- but I was in a bad neighborhood. As paranoid as I am, I'm almost not paranoid enough.

It's good to have two fully automatic and completely independent backup methods. Data wants to die, and backup is still an unsolved problem.

-fn-

[1] Incidentally, you can't easily report a purchase problem to Apple until they process a charge, and to reduce transaction costs they wait a few days before they process. This is very annoying! Also, the UI for reporting a purchase problem is suspiciously clumsy. More on that experience when I see what they do.
[2] In reality they common failure points of course - me, computer memory, etc. There is the older offsite backup though, so complete and total data loss is probably less than 1/1,000,000.
[3] Donationware. I donated. I wish donation ware apps would let us set a 'reminder' so I could donate yearly. I suppose I should just make donationware donations every year on my birthday against the apps I use.
[4] I'd love to have automated offsite backup too, but I've never foundan offsite vendor I trusted and I expect ISPs to eventually charge for bandwidth use.

See also:

• CrashPlan (or JungleDisk) instead of Retrospect 8? (1/2010)
• Online backup – the security problem (it’s not the encryption)
• backup (50 or so posts on backup)
• Retrospect 8.2 for OS X fails my latest review -- because it's been abandoned (11/2010 - I checked under the latest owner but it felt the same)
• Freeing up Time Capsule space – and documentation for Time Machine and Time Capsule (12/2009 - TM/TC are better quality now, but the documentation still sucks).
• Time Machine, Time Capsule and offsite backup (2/2010)
• My 10.6 iMac is crashing - a debugging exercise (2/2010 - using hardware test)

Update 12/21/2011: I was closer to the cliff than I realized.

Twitter to WordPress via ifttt - limitations

Weeks after Google's Day of Infamy i'm still failing to fully replace Google Reader Shares. Recently I gave up on Tumblr, Posterous, the zombie version of Google Reader, and some screen-scraping attempts to turn G+ streams into feeds.

Lately I've been focusing on my @jgordonshare tweets and tonight I tried using ifttt to create a WordPress feed-equipped archive of tweets.

It was easy to setup the ifttt task to turn the tweets into WP posts. I used a "1 button install" Dreamhost [1] WordPress instance I've been testing. I had to turn on XML-RPC publishing (used by Windows Live Writer, MarsEdit, etc) and provide a WordPress username and password [2].

The ifttt doesn't trigger immediately after tweet creation. I assume it checks the Twitter stream every 15-30 minutes. I manually triggered a check from the ifttt dashboard.

Here's an example of what I got

Just testing iftt tweeting to wp (sorry). http://t.co/GbR8Qdud

... Just testing iftt tweeting to wp (sorry). http://t.co/GbR8Qdud...

Yeah,  not to impressive. The problem is a tweet is simply a string, it has no special structure, no way to distinguish URL from my commentary from page title from annotation (not that there's room for all that). Tweets are much simpler entities than old-style Google Reader shares.

The experiment did work, but the result isn't terribly interesting.

So the quest goes on ...

[1] Use the code "KATEVA" or this link and you are supposed to get 50% off your 1st year costs and I get an equal saving as credit.
[2] Obviously you should create a user for this purpose and create a unique password. IFTTT has to know your credentials.

See also:

• Dreamhost - apparently the kickbacks work 6/2010
• Google reader shared items to Facebook 3/2009 - Google's glory days - before the Fall
• Loving Google Reader - Shared post feed 9/2008 - Google's apex
• My reader shares are back for now - thanks to Keakon 11/2011 - sweet hack, but a bit of a security risk
• Social wrestling: Google Reader, Twitterfeed, Blogger and Facebook 4/2010 - twitterfeed is still around
• Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes 9/2008 - never quite worked, but an interesting example
• Using Bloggers undocumented label (category) feeds and Yahoo Pipes to create a tech opinion feed out of Gordon's Notes - 2/09 - fiddling
• Tweeting Google Reader Shares and Notes via feedburner 10/2010 - we assume Google will axe feedburner in 2012
• FreeMyFeed - Getting Twitter feed to Google Reader - turning twitter into rss 4/2009
• Microblogging and Google Reader: Tumblr Fails 11/2011
• After the fall of Google Reader: Posterous, Tumblr and Zootool with Twitter on the side 11/2011. I haven't tried Zootool yet.

How to learn what your current AT&T mobile contracted services are

AT&T has the lowest customer service rating of American mobile phone companies. Of course that's like asking what's worse - Ebola or Rabies?

This is not because of their retail staff. They must give them powerful drugs, because, despite working for a moderately evil corporation, they're remarkably cheerful.

Their web site though, that's part of what makes them "Rabies" rather than just "Ebola".

For example, for the past few days I've been trying to follow up on some extensive bill slashing changes. In particular I've been trying to find a current contract summary for our family plan. I think I've found the best that ATT offers, but they have one of the worst web sites I've ever come across. [1]

As of Nov 2011 try this. Don't click on the tabs, but mouse over to see the substructures. Note you may have to authenticate repeatedly.

• Go to your AT&T mobile account page. Look at the top menu structure. It will say myAT&T, with "tabs" like "Overview", "Bill & Payments" and so on. Depending on the services you use some are not useful, but they will still appear. The tabs that are useful for a mobile-only customer are
  
  • Bill & Payments: see current bill statement
  • Wireless: usage and recent activity
  • Profile: user information
• From user information look for "Contract Information". Click Customer Service Summary and Contract. Now you get a popup window. In there you find several options including two that, despite their names, both show a similar PDF (these links may actually work as shortcuts once you're authenticated):
  
  • Wireless customer agreement: This is the real deal. CSS plus six pages that summarize your true contract [2]
  • Customer service summary (wireless): Just the CSS
  • Alternatively, AT&T's "Your Phone CSS" email provides this link with goes to a screen I can't find when I navigate the site, in fact it seems to be a outside of the tabs they define and possibly a separate web site: https://www.wireless.att.com/olam/loginAction.olamexecute?target=CSS. There's a trick here. Unless you read carefully, you'll hit the "continue" button -- that will just take you back to the main site. Instead, look for the link under the wireless number drop down and click that. You get the PDF contract summary.

Note that under the Wireless tab is a "Rate Plan" link, but it only shows voice plan.

So, in summary, to determine your actually currently contracted services for a family plan you need to print/view a PDF for each individual family member and do the sums to produce an integrated view.

I wonder if there's a medical term for the psychosis induced by dealing with AT&T?

Next up: How to track SMS use.

[1] The primary flaw is that AT&T mixes marketing with service. There are other reasons, but that's the primary dysfunction. What I want to know is mixed with what they want to sell me. A secondary reason, is that they choose not to invest in areas that allow customers to see what their contracts are. Those investments have a low return on investment and will not contribute to someone making VP. It's just a happy accident that it works this way.

[2] Update: AT different times I got different PDFs for different users. Only my wife, a secondary number, produced the full six page report when I requested a "wireless customer agreement".

Update 12/11/11: I've studied the PDFs in more detail. They are quite hard to interpret, particularly for a family plan, but, with some study, they do show the current contract. I think the "wireless customer agreement" is a copy of the original contract, but the "customer service summary" is the current contract.

Deleting Google Profile breaks picasa share links

I  recently deleted my Google Profile. The link explains why.

I expected consequences and I am not disappointed.

Today many of my share links to my Picasa albums have broken. The albums are still gone, but the share links don't work.

It's easy to see why. Here's a link I shared last week to one of my recent albums. I've bolded the problem (omitting the auth key)

https://picasaweb.google.com/113810027503326386174/WildcatVsEagleNov2011

Here's today's link to the same album ...

https://picasaweb.google.com/jfaughnan/WildcatVsEagleNov2011

When I deleted my profile I removed my 2007 identity: 113810027503326386174. With the advent of G+ that identifier was the basis of shared image links. When I removed G+, those links broke.

Fortunately I hadn't shared that many albums recently. I got singed, but not burned.

I feel like I escaped the burning house of G+ just in time. Future exits will be far more difficult -- if not impossible.

Google doc share links cannot be changed

Google uses the secret share link feature in a few places. In several places the share link can be changed. I think of that as an essential feature; a way to correct a share mistake or deal with an escaped link.

Google Apps shared item links, however, cannot be changed.

Nobody talks about this.

Sometimes I think I'm the only person in the world who actually uses Google Docs.