iMac Hard Drive Failure

Well, it finally happened. The hard drive in my iMac died last night. The iMac was acting slow and flakey, so I rebooted it. When it came back on, there was a strange clicking noise and I got the Missing System Folder image on the screen. I wouldn't be so worried about the drive (AppleCare should replace it free) if it weren't for the fact that I was hosting most of my websites on an Ubuntu Linux VMware image running on the iMac. The good news is that my system was backed up via Time Machine to an external firewire hard drive. The bad news is that, to stop my system from slowing to a crawl every time Time Machine ran, I stupidly excluded the VMware image from the regular backups. The most current VM image backup I have is from September 14th, nearly a month ago. Mostly that means a bunch of images are missing from my photolog and from my photo gallery. The original photos are safe on my MacBook so I can repost them. I can probably get recover the post titles and descriptions from Google's cache. I did have a bootable backup of my iMac on a second partition of my Time Machine external drive, so at the moment, the iMac is booted from the backup drive. I should make a backup of my backup drive soon in case it fails too. It feels like I'm flying with one engine at the moment. In the meantime, I'm running the VM image on the Mac Mini I have hooked up to my TV and use as a home media center. Since its usually idle most of the day, this should work fine, although its 1GB of RAM will be a little tight. I don't know how performance will be if I try to watch TV on it. I have no backups running on the Mini, so I need to dig up another external drive for that as well. I haven't found WiFi to be very reliable, so I ran an ethernet cable from my home office down the stairs to the Mini. It's ugly, but works for the moment. Eventually I want to run a cable from the office to the basement, where I could then run it to the Mini or anything else. I had previously purchased parts to build a cheap, plain Linux box that would then run the WM image of my websites but had problems with Ubuntu and the video card (Video card support has always been a problem with Linux for me). The box is noisy and probably eats a lot of power, so I might leave the sites on the Mini permanently once I upgrade the RAM. I've heard tales of failed drives coming back to life one last time by thumping them, or cooling them, or smearing them with goat blood. I'm hoping if I try restarting the iMac several times that I can get the drive to come up long enough to copy over the 8GB Linux VM image. So far no luck.