Maggie moved in with us a few weeks ago to attend NC State. Her 2 year old Macbook Pro stopped booting up a few days later. I was able to run a diagnostic on the pc and discovered one of the Ram cards was giving an error. After removing the offending ram the issue persisted. Maggie took the pc to the mac-store for the “Genius’s” to take a look. They convinced her it was a bad hard drive and could fix it for $200.
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The hard drive is/was/ fine.
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$200 to replace a drive? They cost like $50 online, so that means it cost $150 to install it, which takes literally 2 minutes. Genius’s apparently bill at $4,500 an hour.
My sister being the smart college student she is did not get it fixed and brought it home. I was able to determine the drive was fine and set to re-install the OS and call it a day. Apple has a very neat tool which is only a 2mb download, you boot to it, and it installs the OS for you over the wifi connection. Very very slick. However it being a Apple product means only Apple users can get the tool. You can not create the USB utility using anything other then a Mac. Luckily my friend Chris has a Mac and agreed to make the tool for me.
So with the tool created I boot up the mac and wipe the drive, I select reinstall Mountain Lion, it asks for a Appstore login. Little sister logs in and it says she did not purchase Mountain Lion (She didn’t). Ok time to purchase Mountain Lion. The only way you can purchase Mountain Lion is from a Apple computer, not even kidding. It is literally impossible to purchase it any other way. I even called their sales support and tried to do it over the phone, no go. So after explaining this to Chris he mentions he did purchase Mountain Lion, and wanted to burn it to a Dual Layer DVD for me.
Chris burned the disc for me on his Mac and the install went smooth after that.
Moral of the story? Don’t try fixing a Mac unless you have another Mac nearby