Just realized I hadn’t updated since the HDD in my iMac was replaced. I bit the bullet and did without my iMac for about a week, letting Apple replace the dead HDD under warranty. The iMac is now back on my desk where it belongs, with a new 640GB HDD, which was a “free” upgrade, as Apple no longer stocks the 500GB drives my iMac originally came with.
As far as OSX goes, everything works great.
The new annoyance came when attempting to setup dual-booting. For some reason I don’t entirely understand, my iMac refuses to boot from any Windows installation disc. The initial Bootcamp setup works fine – resizing the HFS+ partition, creating the partition for WIndows to be installed to, and rebooting. No problems.
Insert the WIndows disc, the machine boots, and I’m left at a black text-mode screen, with a flashing cursor in the upper left. I’ve let it sit for several hours here with no change, so it’s not just “going slow” through the installer.
I’ve tried several Windows CDs, XP SP2, XP SP3, Vista32, Vista64, Win7 RC, Win7 32, Win7 64 – all produce exactly the same behavior.
Over on the Apple discussion boards, other folks have run into this problem as well. Some had success after zapping PRAM several times at various stages of the process. Others reported success after thoroughly wiping the drive, or removing all hardware except a keyboard and mouse. None of these things have worked for me.
So, I’ve pretty much given up for the moment, and just run my iMac in OSX. It means a bit less gaming on the iMac – and thus a bit more on the 360/PS3. Fine by me for now since WoW runs great on OSX, and there’s several good games out currently for the consoles that I’ve been itching to play.
Regardless, it’s a problem I’d *really* like to get fixed soon. Apple of course provides no support for Bootcamp beyond providing the partitioner and Windows drivers, so it’s not something I can drop in their hands. It feels like some sort of BIOS/firmware issue – but of course there’s no downloadable firmware available for my particular model of iMac.
Still searching…