After coming back from a business trip, I came home to find that the hard drive had failed on my wife’s computer. It’s an older iMac, first generation Intel. We’ve never had a problem with it. And now that it is 6 months out of Apple Care, the hard drive failed.
After installing a hard drive and tearing through the cosmetic inside of the computer, I put it back together and started it up. It’s important to note that the very first step was taking out of the memory or RAM.
When I turned the computer back on for the first time, it turned on, but the display wouldn’t come on and the white light on the front flashed quickly. You can imagine my panic at 1:30 AM when I realized I would have to disassemble the whole computer again, taking out the tiny screws and putting them back in. Then I had an idea, what about the memory/RAM? I had put it back in, but maybe it wasn’t in all the way.