Your iMac G4 has a bug in it. No really, it does!

Last week we had an older iMac G4 come in for some service. It appeared to us that the hard drive was failing, and perhaps overheating. In order to rescue the client’s data we opted to remove the hard drive and hook it up externally to see if we could perform some “lite” data recovery.
Well, getting the unit apart was not too much of a problem, and the hard drive was easily extracted AND successfully backed up. We were surprised to see a dead moth inside the computer (see picture below). Folks, please keep your computers backed up and test that back up often. Hard drives frequently don’t survive 6 or 7 years of service (This iMac came out in 2002!). Heat is not a hard drive’s friend either and can often shorten it’s life. Be sure to keep your computer cool, and free of dust. See out post on replacing hard drives BEFORE they fail and why backups are VERY important: http://www.HardDrivesDie.com.

See large size picture here.

See large size picture here.
It’s not the first time we’ve run into little critters in our travels. Recently while on-site in the Baltimore area we were called to investigate a networking problem. A lone user could not access the client company’s servers, and we needed to find out why. We tried switching computers at the sick Ethernet port, then Ethernet cables. After poking around we opted to unscrew the jack from the wall, and when we did a whole box of “Animal Crackers” which has been stashed by a rodent fell out of the network jack’s mounting hole.