First trip to the Genius Bar- bad hard drive

I made my very first trip to the Genius Bar in my local Apple store today due to the problems my MacBook Pro has been having.  I considered live blogging it but in the end decided not to because there really wasn't anything to share.  I arrived on time for my appointment and sat next to three other Apple customers who were being served by Genius Paul, the only genius in attendance today.  All three of the other folks were needing help with syncing their iPods and Paul was constantly having to explain how that process can go wrong.

When my turn arrived I was pleasantly served by Paul who asked me about the problems and I must say he actually listened and accepted what I told him I was experiencing and what I had done so far.  No goofy scripts to follow by these geniuses, they take what you tell them in good faith and react accordingly.  It was quite refreshing I must say.  Hearing that I was sometimes getting 3 beeps at boot time Paul took out the two RAM cards in the MBP and swapped slots.  My MBP has 3 GB of RAM with one card holding 2 GB and the other 1.  He said sometimes just reseating them helps so swapping them was an attempt to rule out that possibility.

The first time he booted the MBP after swapping the memory hung up so he attached a portable firewire drive with every major version of Tiger and Leopard installed.  This let him boot the MBP from his own version of Leopard so he could run some diagnostics that couldn't be run otherwise.  The very first thing he ran into was repeated disk errors that could not be repaired by the disk utility so the diagnosis was a bad hard drive.  He never could get the memory diagnostics to run due to the disk errors so hopefully that's my only problem.  They didn't have a 160 GB drive in stock so he had to order one that hopefully will only take a few days to come in.  He offered to let me bring in my external Seagate drive to restore my Time Machine backup for me but I told him I'd do that myself.  It was nice of him to offer to do that in any event.  Hopefully I'll have my MBP back soon so I can see if this fixes all of my problems running.

I have to say that I was impressed with the entire experience of bringing the system to Apple.  They did exactly what I would have done in their position given the symptoms and what I told them I had already done.  I never felt like I was treated like a newbie which happens at most shops, rather he listened and he let me become part of the investigation which was nice.  Here's hoping a happy ending is nigh.  On the negative side they had no MacBook Airs to demo, they said stores won't have them for another week and a half so if you want to see one for yourself you'll have to wait.

Comments

[Scott_H]

A bad hard drive? Already? Didn't you just get that thing?

Are you going to be able to wipe the hard drive before Apple replaces it? Apparently, they don't let you keep the old hard drive after they put your new one in:

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/12/22/macsAreEvenMoreExpensiveTh.html

[Alan Reiter]

Hi James,

I called four Apple stores on the East and West Coasts (for a column I wrote about the MacBook Air) and they all said the same thing: They will be getting units in a couple of weeks. It seems that when Apple is ready to ship the product to consumers -- the two weeks that Jobs said -- the Apple stores will have them on display.

[John in Norway]

And this makes Paul a 'Genius' in what way?

[James Kendrick]

It said so on his shirt.

[John in Norway]

Good one!

[Mike Cane]

All Your Disk Sectors Are Belong To Us!

[Taxman]

My daughter needs to run Windows for one of her engineering classes, so I ended up giving her my MacBook with Vista in a Boot Camp partition and taking back her 12" PowerBook that was my computer 4 computers ago. The computer has 1 Ghz processor and 768MB RAM and a 60GB drive. What am I learning? (1) Maybe Windows doesn't need to permanently reside on my notebook. Right now, I'm just using Safari browser to log into gotomypc.com at office if I need access to Windows. (2)If I don't need a big Windows partition on my notebook, 80GB is plenty, (3) 12" PB is still my favorite Apple form factor of all times and Leopard isn't bad at all even with 768MB RAM, and (4) This is still a pretty useful machine.

So, that being said, I'm more eager than ever to get my hands on a MacBook Air when they arrive at stores.

[Dave Zatz]

I'm having my Mom pick up a Mac Mini because of the Genius Bar. I'm going to outsource her tech support to Apple. ;)

I've used them once for MBP three issues - they first dude couldn't help with one issue, but another guy was able to. Two issues were solved, the other they decided I have a bad optical drive which is about $300 to replace and $150 for labor - ouch. While this is a company laptop, I'm not going to saddle them with the bill since I rarely need an optical drive.